Magdalena Ziolkowska

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  picks June 15, 2021

  Marta Sala, Grzegorz Siembida

  Travis Jeppesen’s 2019 essay “Queer Abstraction (Or How to Be a Pervert with No Body). Some Notes Toward a Probability” asked whether nonrepresentational art could ever be understood as queer or nonbinary. Curator Tomek Baran took Jeppesen’s question as the starting point for “WOW,” an exhibition that brings together works by Marta Sala and Grzegorz Siembida. Both artists escape classification, making use of seemingly spontaneous and yet exacting gestures that situate their paintings, textiles, and installations somewhere between construction and destruction. Baran plays on this ambiguity by

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  picks March 25, 2021

  Alicja Bielawska

  “Exercises in interweaving time and places,” Alicja Bielawska’s latest exhibition, features monochrome portieres, colorful crayon drawings, and ceramic objects sparsely arranged along the walls, some in vaguely clocklike configurations. Together, these works appear not so much as a unified installation as a group of figures searching for their rightful place within the gallery.  

  Bielawska, who trained as an art historian before studying visual arts at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in the mid-2000s, has elicited comparisons to Sol LeWitt, though her environments rewire viewers’ perceptions

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  print March 2021

  Joanna Piotrowska

  It is commonly said that every protest needs a face. A face gives a protest not only an identity, but also credibility and public trust. However, not every face can be the face of every strike, every act of civil disobedience, or every resistance movement. When a specific aspect of the system is criticized, the act of resistance is particularly pronounced. “Good girls don’t protest,” repeat mothers and grandmothers. Good girls don’t curse, shout, get angry. And yet they do: Once again this past fall, Polish women took to the streets to decry new governmental restrictions on their reproductive

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  picks July 21, 2020

  Teresa Tyszkiewicz

  In Hollis Frampton’s mesmerizing 1963 photograph of Lee Lozano, the artist smiles coyly behind a workbench arrayed with screws, cogs, clamps, and bullets—objects that would become the anthropomorphized and hyperreal forms on her large-format canvases. Similar assortments of tools—screws, steel rods, saws, and pins—permeate the work of the multidisciplinary artist Teresa Tyszkiewicz, who passed away earlier this year. Born in 1953 in Ciechanów, she left martial-law Poland in 1982 for France, where she began fastening pins, sometimes covered in thick acrylic paint, cotton, wool, or horsehair, onto

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  picks March 27, 2020

  Race and Forest

  The forest is a master of camouflage. It obliterates the traces of refugees. It hides bodies and bones. A criminologist might call it a silent witness—a subject who holds traces of the evidence and has not given up all their secrets just yet. But instead of unveiling them over time, the forest covers them more and more.

  The exhibition “Race and Forest” by Nabil Ahmed and the interdisciplinary collective INTERPRT, commissioned by the TBA21-Academy, uses forensic archaeology to present a case study—through video, prints, digital diagrams, and texts—of the first Nazi extermination camp, hidden in

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  picks March 06, 2020

  “Breaching Borders”

  The International Triennial of Tapestry is one of the oldest artistic fabric exhibitions (and competitions) in the world, and its sixteenth edition, “Breaching Borders,” stretches the definition of a medium historically limited by specialist rules and workshop techniques. At long last, it appears that debates over terms such as fabric, tapestry, and textile-object are being swept under the carpet.

  If the works selected by the jury are any indication, the contemporary textile has shed its physical integrity; it appears as fragment, as remnant, sometimes even as waste: the product of the overproduction