Barbara Kozłowska: Places for Deliberation
The exhibition presents the most important works by Barbara Kozłowska from the 1960s and 1970s, which tell about her subjectivity and express her freedom within the political system in which she lived. She was one of the pioneers of performance art in Poland and a participant in the Wrocław avant-garde scene – one of the most vibrant and progressive places on the regional map at that time. At the same time, when the Slovenian OHO Group resettled to the Vipava Valley, Barbara Kozłowska left her Wrocław studio and hit the beach. Although she graduated from the Faculty of Ceramics (with a degree in architectural painting), she quickly abandoned traditional media in favor of ephemeral activities.
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Marika Kuźmicz and will be accompanied by four performances curated by Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś, Ana Grobler and Sebastian Krawczyk. A monographic publication will also be available at the exhibition. It was prepared by the Arton Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław, edited by Marika Kuźmicz, with texts by Marika Kuźmicz, Karolina Majewska, Piotr Lisowski, and Wiktoria Szczupacka.
Barbara Kozłowska
Barbara Kozłowska (she/her) was born in 1940 in Tarnobrzeg and died in 2008 in Wrocław. She was a conceptual artist associated with the Wrocław avant-garde scene and the informal art group Brzeg, which mainly carried out performative actions, and co-founder of the Babel Gallery. The most important elements of her artistic expression were movement, travel, space and its crossing, and the exploration of "ordinary" reality, which constantly occupied her. She also expressed this with a key phrase that sums up her creativity: "You can see all this anywhere."
Anna Kalwajtys: Linija, performans
phto: Ewa Bielańczyk
“Art should be treated as a living being.” — Barbara Kozłowska
Referring to the work of Barbara Kozłowska, this performance draws on the concept of space as a site for recognizing diversity and heterogeneity. A central point of reference is her “Total Concept of the Line” – an idea the artist articulated as a processual structure for exploring relationships: with the cosmos, the material world, subjectivity, and Otherness. Anna Kalwajtys, in a performance dedicated to Barbara Kozłowska, emphasizes the crossing of various types of boundaries – both material and symbolic – and highlights the importance of cooperation and dialogue, values fundamental to Kozłowska’s artistic practice. In this action, drawing on Kozłowska’s practices of line-marking, Kalwajtys employs minimalist means of expression, gesture reduction, and the physical presence of the artist. These become tools for exploring space as a medium of dialogue, co-presence, and collaboration. The act of crossing boundaries – of successive dimensions of space and presence – is presented not only as an aesthetic gesture, but also as one of political and existential significance.
25 min, 2025, spontaneous interactions in English, free entry
Anna Kalwajtys (she/her) currently lives in Gdańsk, Poland. She creates in the fields of performance, video performance, and object-installation artworks. She also works on interdisciplinary and curatorial projects related to the phenomenon of performativity. Her actions address issues of human physicality and biology, the process of forming cultural identity, the exclusion of weaker individuals from society, and borderline existential situations.
Lučka Centa: ved'ma
photo: Nina Pernat
Ved’ma looks at life and death at the same time, as its blood is drawn directly from the earth. Trapped in the patriarchal conflict, she remains wild, unruly, and untameable. Love with the wild and belong freely. Above all, she trusts herself - she is the embodiment of the self that knows no fear.
The performance by Lučka Centa focuses on an updated archetype of the witch, the rebellious and untameable, self-sufficient and uninhibited, who belongs freely and by her own will. She is no longer an ancient Slavic witch, a monstrous outcast, but an empowered modern feminist who, inseparably linked to the environment, weaves a rebellion against patriarchy and capitalism, against the shameless exploitation and enslavement of natural resources and living beings.
The ecofeminist statement is also hidden in the scenographic elements: part of the performance is the wood from this year's clear-cutting on Grajski grič in Ljubljana, which has stirred public opinion. During the performance, the scenographic elements transform from the objects to subjective extensions of the artist's body or perhaps even come to life as symbionts. With them, the artist gives a voice to the unheard nature or takes it for herself. In the meaningful red light from the pile of earth and the artist's strong anchoring presence, a magic emerges, her body gradually merging with the bundle of branches, her movement, this intertwining of matter and body, illustrating the search for contact and balance between the social and the natural in new ways of connected empowered coexistence.
The performance premiered at the 26th Red Dawns Festival as part of the Bread and Roses series, curated by Tatiana Kocmur at Cirkulacija2. Technical assistance: Klemen Brank
2025, 40 min, universal language of art
Lučka Centa (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who combines performance, photography, video, and installation. She graduated in 2021 from the Academy of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she researched artistic production within the natural space to understand the relationship between humans and nature. In her work, she focuses on exploring inter-species interdependence, the impact of humans on nature, and the social valuation of different bodies and entities. As a graduate of the master's program in sculpture at ALUO, she focuses on the materialization of performative practice through the exploration of intersections between performance and installation media, with the idea that the body is a bridge that erases the divide between the natural and the social.
Iva Suhadolnik Gregorin: Tape
photo: courtesy of the artist
Tape is a participatory performance that explores the tension between proximity and distance. Inspired by Italo Calvino's
The Distance of the Moon (1965), where the full moon gets so close to the Earth that people can climb it from boats using ladders. The work reinterprets gravity as a force that not only acts between celestial bodies but also as a force of human desire. In Calvino's story, when the sailors find themselves on the moon, they feel the changing forces between the two worlds - the familiar gravity of the Earth disappears, and it is replaced by the moon's attractive force. Here, the tape becomes a metaphor for this fragile attraction: a material that binds but also releases, measures, and holds in place. Like the ladder in Calvino's story, the tape is both a bridge and a bond - a way to solidify fleeting proximity or as its remnant - a sign of separation. Between the earth and the moon. Between you and me.
2025, 45 min, universal language of art
Iva Suhadolnik Gregorin (she/her) is a conceptual and visual artist. In her practice, she explores the issues of work, identity, and power relationships. She connects this topic with its context through participatory performance, documentation, and photography. It combines its emotional and personal landscape with the political and asserts that they are undoubtedly connected. She places great importance on revealing the inner mechanisms of performance and photography as art forms. Her artistic practice serves as an opportunity to create temporary spaces that invite emancipation and/or act as a catalyst for the breakdown of the work ethic.
Anita Wach:68 Toasts to a Flawed Heart
photo: Marcandrea
68 Toasts to a Flawed Heart is dedicated to Barbara Kozłowska. The performance refers to her as an artist, poet and artistic subject - a personality set in a political and historical context and a person who lived 68 years, 272 seasons and approximately 816 months. Influenced by the poetic and conceptual purity of Kozlowska's art, Anita Wach decides to expose her body to the forces of gravity. She uses herself as a reference point for both human and universal nature. Like Kozlowska, Wach treats her body as an inseparable part of the surrounding world in terms of time, space and laws of nature. The performance is designed as a genetic fusion of the two women's biographies and artistic approaches. The audience is invited to a celebration of universal patterns of art (and life) as infinite and fragile processes. Placed on top of a ‘tower’ constructed from products of the human mind, a performer will try hard to avoid fall and maintain a precarious equilibrium between elation and instability. Guided by a desire to merge structured reason and the flawed heart, she will attempt to lead the celebration, standing at the point where the most mundane yet imminent matters meet those of cosmic magnitude.
2025, 50 min, universal language of art
Anita Wach (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, and performer. From 1996 to 2003, she worked as a dancer at the Silesian Dance Theater in Bytom. Since 2005, she has been part of the Warsaw-based collective Teatr Bretoncaffe. She is a resident of Pact Zollwerein in Essen and a scholarship holder of the Pro Helvetia Foundation and the Ministry of Culture. She is a member of the international collective Via Negativa (Slovenia) and the experimental collective TukaWach. She is also a mentor in the international residency program of the PARL – Performing Art Research Ljubljana platform.
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Exhibition curator: Marika Kuźmicz
Curator of the Polish performance art program: Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś
Curators of the Slovenian performance art program: Ana Grobler and Sebastian Krawczyk
Performers: Anita Wach, Anna Kalwajtys, Iva Suhadolnik Gregorin, Lučka Centa
Program associate: Iva Kovač, Hana Čeferin
Organiser: Center for Culture and Art in Wrocław – Lower Silesian Government Cultural Institute; Co-organisers: Mala galerija BS, Arton Foundation, City of Women, Cultural and Artistic Association Mreža (KUD Mreža); Partner: Embassy of the Republic of Poland; Honorary patronage: Marta Cienkowska - Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and Łukasz Paprotny – Acting Chargé d’Affaires of the Republic of Poland in Ljubljana. acknowledgement: Cankarjev dom, MG+MSUM.
The project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund and the budget of the Lower Silesian regional government.
