The opening of the series, attended by Ewa Partum—one of the key figures in Polish conceptual art and recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań—offers a return to the roots where the female body became a tool for critical reflection on language, culture, and social visibility.
Partum’s practice—which stands alongside the work of artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Ana Mendieta, and Yoko Ono—belongs to a movement that recognized the female body not only as a medium of expression but as a site of contention, rewriting, and dismantling of dominant cultural discourses. Like Schneemann in Interior Scroll (1975) exposed patriarchal mechanisms of exclusion of the female voice, and Mendieta, in her Silhouette series (1973–80), explored the relationship between the female presence and nature, Partum analyzed the tensions between the construction of female subjectivity, power structures, and language—both the material and the culturally shaped.
“New Perspectives” presents performance as a medium in which history is not a closed narrative, but a living structure of dialogue. Invited to collaborate with the work of EWA PARTUM, PRZEMEK BRANAS, JOANNA PAWLIK, and MARTA ZIÓŁEK, they do not reconstruct history but update it, creating a contemporary framework for understanding performance as a medium for reflection on the body, relationships, and community. The result is a new genealogy of performance, in which individual artistic practice is not merely a backdrop but an active matrix, capable of transformation and co-creating future forms of presence.
Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś, curator of the project
December 3, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Laboratory Theater Hall, Jerzy Grotowski Institute
(Przejście Żelaźnicze/Rynek-Ratusz 27)
Free entry
