Artists

Zofia Kulik

Press release

This exhibition focuses on Zofia Kulik’s exploration of irony as a critical tool within her artistic practice. It encompasses both her individual work and the seventeen-year collaboration within the duo KwieKulik. Through absurdity, seriality, and formal exaggeration, her work exposes mechanisms of power and the paradoxes of everyday life in the Polish People’s Republic. The works also reflect the socio-political transformation following 1989 and the increasing presence of the Catholic Church in public life. The exhibition presents two key stages of Kulik’s practice: the performative actions realized together with Przemysław Kwiek during the 1970s and 1980s, and the monumental photographic compositions developed from the late 1980s onward. The later works, constructed through black-and-white multiple exposures, marked Kulik’s emancipation as an independent artist. Although her practice shifted from ephemeral actions and documentation toward large-scale photomontages composed of numerous photographic modules, both periods remain connected through a sustained investigation of power, control, and representation. Exaggeration, visual play, and serial structures repeatedly undermine the authority of political imagery and the official language of ideology. Irony becomes not only a strategy of critique, but also a means of distancing oneself from dominant historical narratives. The first part of the exhibition focuses on the activities of KwieKulik, whose practice combined performance, artistic action, and documentation. In The Banana and the Pomegranate, an absurd sequence of images and objects — a stone in a glass of water, passports, pig snouts, or a broken? milk bottle, a small eagle made of a soap — creates a kind of “theatre of objects” in which state, religious, and private symbols lose their stable meanings. The linguistic play embedded in the word granat, meaning both pomegranate and grenade in Polish, together with grotesque arrangements of flags and gestures, reveals contradictions between the official image of the state and the realities of everyday life. The work exposes the ways power objectifies the individual while simultaneously operating through grotesque associations and unstable meanings. A similar strategy appears in KwieKulik. Nudes on Stamps – Mail Art (1979), where the artists’ official passport photographs were transformed into a subversive erotic photomontage. After participating in an exhibition in Malmö in 1975, KwieKulik lost their passports for several years. Through the use of transparent colored foils and fragmented bodies, the artists juxtaposed intimacy with the language of administrative control. Provocation and visual humor dismantle the seriousness of bureaucracy while simultaneously becoming a metaphor for the duo’s symbiotic creative relationship. An important aspect of KwieKulik’s practice were slide projections such as Variants of Red and The Path of Edward Gierek, based on the rhythmic multiplication of political symbols and newspaper imagery. The repeated use of red elements revealed propaganda as a mechanism of aesthetic organization and ideological image production. The second part of the exhibition is devoted to Kulik’s individual practice following the dissolution of KwieKulik. During this period, the artist developed her characteristic language of monumental black-and-white photomontages constructed from multiple exposures and modular arrangements. These works evoke the aesthetics of ornament, heraldry, and propaganda monuments while simultaneously destabilizing their authority through formal excess. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth interprets irony in Kulik’s work not merely as a visual effect, but as a form of historical consciousness. According to the scholar, Kulik’s photomontages employ repetition, fragmentation, and amplification in order to challenge established narratives of political and art history. Rather than nostalgic, these works critically reinterpret collective memory, revealing how ideological pasts continue to shape the present. Through the multiplication of gestures, symbols of authority, and subordinated bodies, Kulik transforms the visual language of totalitarian systems into ornamental and rhythmic structures that expose their internal contradictions. In Kulik’s work, ornament never functions merely as decoration. Instead, it becomes a structure through which political and visual memory is organized. Repeated military, religious, and corporeal motifs generate images that oscillate between fascination and critique. By transforming symbols of authority into dense ornamental patterns, Kulik exposes the aesthetic mechanisms through which ideology operates. Excess and accumulation serve as tools for revealing how images construct collective imagination while simultaneously destabilizing the narratives they appear to celebrate. A central work within this section is Splendour of Myself II from the Common Arts collection, in which Kulik presents herself as a sovereign figure. The monumental costume is composed of dozens of black-and-white photographs of a nude body subordinated to the ornamental order of the composition. This gesture simultaneously reverses traditional relations of gaze and authority while commenting on historical representations of power. Particularly significant is the juxtaposition of monumentality with banal attributes — a ruff made of lettuce leaves, a cucumber, and a dandelion — which undermine the pathos of the official portrait. Humor emerges through exaggerated grandeur and the multiplication of identity-forming elements that both glorify and ridicule the idea of sovereignty. The series Archive of Gestures (1987–1991) constitutes a photographic catalogue of poses, gestures, and cultural signs performed by the nude model — artist Zbigniew Libera — against a neutral background. The systematic arrangement of the body creates a visual lexicon derived equally from art history, religious iconography, and totalitarian aesthetics. Kulik treats the body as a carrier of historical codes and social choreographies of power. At the same time, the theatricality and stylization of these representations keep the boundary between the heroic and the grotesque deliberately unstable. The exhibition proposes reading irony not as a satirical device, but as a method of critical reflection on the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the persistence of structures of power. The works of Kulik and KwieKulik demonstrate that political systems operate through images, rituals, and repetition — and that deformation and exaggeration can create distance from dominant narratives. – Timothy Persons