ARTIST PROFILE
- Poland (b. 1976)
- Currently in London, United Kingdom.
- Polish visual artist. Her artistic interests are located between visual arts, literature and anthropology. She is focused on the phenomenon of the body as a text, storage of memories and bodygraphy.
REPRESENTATION
- Muzalewska Gallery
- Poznan, Poland
CONTACT & LINKS
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic work is focused on the conflict between the condition of the human body and discursive language. My research provides an overview of the phenomenon of the human body as a textual form, repository for memories and emotions. I analyse issues relating to the awareness, the borders and possibilities of language, as well as the human body and corporeality perceived as a 'reality text’. I am interested in the body’s limit states and its inexpressibility.
The body is the phenomenon, which on one hand is subjected to the language and description, but on the other hand it resists of forms of articulation, and it is immune to the words.
In my work I consider the twin factors of the body and the text to be equal: the body of the text means the body as a map, a book or other narrative an individual or a mass (I named this phenomena “bodygraphy”), as well as the text of the body – writing which takes on the form of bodily features, being both material and subjective.
My practice addresses urgent questions such as, ‘Can the body be translated into language?’, ‘Can the body be independent of culture and environment?’
I am focused on the relationship between I – myself – environment.
During my research I would like to engage in a broad discourse on physicality understood as a processual narration and one which in humanities appears both as a central problem in social studies, but also as the vanguard of contemporary humanities (experience of the pain, the body sick). I am focused on the individual corporeal experience analysed often against a broad contemporary historical and social background: illness, crisis, identity, migration, the marginalisation by linguistic barriers, ethnicity, and isolation.
In
wider perspective I intend to search for answers to questions about
the driving forces and processes which have influenced complex ideas
of identity of language and the role of the body, its signs and
senses in contemporary cultural communication.
My
research is interdisciplinary in nature (language, corporeality,
psychology, anthropology and medical aspects) and is informed by the
media and methods which I develop in my art: documentation practice,
performance, video, animation, installation, texts, textual objects,
hypertext-stories, painting and drawing, diary writing, interviews,
records.
BIOGRAPHY
Malgorzata Dawidek is a Polish born visual artist, writer and art historian, currently based in the UK. She came onto the Polish art scene in the early 2000s. Her artistic interests are located between visual arts, literature and anthropology. She deals with the language aspect of communication – the relationship between words and their visual representations. She is focused on the phenomenon of the body as a text, storage of memories and bodygraphy. The artist uses text of the body to talk about organic physicality as a continuous narration, the text “in process”. She is interested in the extreme states of the body, anatomy, aspects of gender, inexpressible emotions, physical limitations and mental blockages.
Dawidek combines a wide range of media in the creation of her projects – textual objects and installations, painting, animation, photographs, written drawings and hypertexts, which are then displayed in galleries, public spaces and as published works of art and record.
Malgorzata Dawidek is also a researcher of visual literature and the author of numerous articles, studies and books on visual texts, including “A Piece of Poetry” (Krakow 2012) and “History of the visual text. Poland after 1967", which was awarded the National Centre of Culture in Poland Prize for the best PhD dissertation in the field of culture studies (2010).
Since 1998, Dawidek's articles, poems and reproductions of her works have been published in various art and literary magazines, inc.: PRO ARTE (in the footer 1998-2000), Czas Kultury (in a footer 2002-2004), EXIT, RITA BAUM, HA! ART (cooperation with the magazine and publishing house since 2000) Zeszyty Artystyczne, Dyskurs, Gazeta Malarzy i Poetów, Autoportret, Opcje, Fragile, as well as in Journal of Artists Books and in exhibition catalogues.