BODY
My artistic practice revolves around the body as a medium, embodying both transience and endurance. Performance art, as I understand it, exists at the intersection of these two qualities. While its essence lies in its fleeting nature, it also serves as a powerful vessel for post-memory, enabling us to address transgenerational traumas and histories that continue to shape our collective identities.
Peggy Phelan’s asserts in The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction the transient nature of performance, existing only in the moment and disappearing once it concludes[1]. While I acknowledge this ephemeral quality as central to the power of performance, my work also seeks to explore how the body can embody meaning that persist beyond the live act.
Performance, in this sense, is not merely a fleeting gesture but a means of engaging with the deeply embedded traces of historical and personal experiences.
In this regard, my approach is deeply informed by the Polish tradition of working with the body, particularly the theatrical practices of Tadeusz Kantor and the visual art of Artur Żmijewski. Kantor’s theatre treated the body as a repository of memory, where the physical presence of the performer became a living archive of history and trauma.
Similarly, Żmijewski’s works, in particular such as 80064[2], uses the body to engage with the past, reenacting and reactivating memories through a deeply visceral and mediated process.
In this sense, the body can serve as the powerful tool for the artist, bridging the viewer to the past. For me, the body’s materiality and performative potential are also not diminished by mediation through new technologies. Instead, these tools amplify the body’s capacity to evoke and sustain memory.
TEXT
As a linguist and lawyer, I perceive language as a tool capable of changing people’s lives and the reality around them. You can use it to cut through reality, slice it into small pieces, and build new meanings from them. Language reshapes reality. Its power cannot be overstated. It is a tool of authority and, at the same time, something deeply intimate, like the language of lovers.
As John Berger noted in Confabulations[3], the Russian term for "mother tongue," Rodnoy yazyk, translates to "Nearest" or "Dearest Tongue," emphasizing its closeness to our very essence. It is through this language that we first connect with the world, absorbing its rhythms, sounds, and meanings as infants, almost as if it is sucked from the mother’s milk.
The mother tongue is not merely a tool for expression but a lens through which we construct and understand reality and the world around us. It creates the framework of our world, shaping how we perceive and articulate our experiences. “Language is a body, a living creature… and this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate”[4].
IMAGE
My first remembered dream was that I was being chased by a great eagle, and I felt a deep sense of fear. But then, the dream shifted. The next image was of me soaring high in the sky, riding on the eagle's back. The fear dissolved, giving way to an overwhelming sense of boundless freedom.
As a child, I was acutely aware of the significance of birds. My father raised homing pigeons, and eagles were their greatest threat. I remember how, whenever we saw a large bird on the roof of our house, we would rush to tell my father.
In turn, my first conscious memory is from when I was four years old. My mother was peeling potatoes in the kitchen, and I was standing on a chair, looking at myself in the mirror. I had two braids tied with red polka-dotted bows. I asked her, “When will I go to school?” She smiled and said, “In two more years.”
The "foggy" aspect refers to the mysterious, or unclear elements within the dream that aren’t immediately understood but hold deep significance. That was also the moment when I got to know the concept of the “dreaming body.” It suggests that we are all constantly dreaming - not only in sleep but also while awake. That we share a common set of subconscious collective symbols throughout generations and generations.
Our bodies and minds continuously express "dreamlike" signals through physical sensations, emotions, spontaneous movements, and subtle experiences. These are not random but meaningful, offering insights into our inner lives, unconscious desires, and unresolved conflicts. Since then, I write down my dreams or shreds of images that I remember from them.
