Born 1998. Studies: Faculty of Industrial Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (bachelor’s degree, 2017–2021), Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw: Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies (bachelor’s degree, 2021–2024), Faculty of Media Art (master’s degree since 2024). He specialises in artistic research, conceptual art and the design of visual communication; he uses typography, drawing, video, photography, textiles, ceramics and visual essays, and also creates installations. He co-operates with the Bęc Zmiana Foundation, mainly in the field of graphic design. Participant of three group exhibitions. Winner of the Graduation Projects 2021 competition and the 14th International Student Design Competition Agrafa’22 (he presented his BA degree piece Surroundings).
In a two-channel video, I deal with the social emancipation of my family. In 1954, my grandfather Karol left Cieszyn Silesia to study in Warsaw. He came from a working-class and peasant family, but after defending his master’s thesis at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology, he joined the growing technical intelligentsia. As part of his master’s thesis, he designed a 100-millimetre tank cannon.
In the practical part of my degree piece, I play as I did in my childhood: I stack blocks, assemble a PIKO toy train and draw, trying to imagine the social processes that my grandfather experienced. Here, I treat drawing as a tool of family emancipation and the train as a symbol of the long journey that my grandfather first made and that I recreate today by travelling on the same Silesia–Warsaw route.
Post-mortem Regina. Zbigniew Libera’s ‘Grandmother’s Corpse’ (1986) and the post-mortem photography
My degree piece is devoted to a series of four photographs by Zbigniew Libera (b. 1959) presenting the dead body of Regina G., his grandmother. Here, I search for Regina’s subjectivity contained in the photographs, starting with her biography reconstructed on the basis of an interview conducted with the artist, and inscribing the photographs in the contexts of funerary photography and the anthropology of death. I use Ewa Domańska’s micro-historical perspective, which falls within the scope of unconventional history, and make use of oral history. The degree piece raises questions about the status of truth in an unverifiable story of the past, about the ethics of photographing a dead body, and about the contemporary attitude to this type of photography. In this way, the text is located on the borderline between different disciplines of the humanities, primarily art history, historiography and anthropology.
