For over two decades, Ewa Zarzycka has been developing her own form of spoken performance, blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. Full of absurd humour and unexpected observations, her stories emerge from seemingly ordinary situations and encounters with the characters of everyday life – family members, neighbours and people she happens to meet. The artist transforms overheard stories, personal experiences and fleeting observations into narratives that reveal unexpected meanings in things that might otherwise seem trivial.
At the festival, Zarzycka will present a performance inspired by the work of Zbigniew Warpechowski, one of the pioneers of performance art in Poland. An encounter with his artistic practice will serve as a starting point for her own artistic statement, unfolding through words, associations and her characteristic sense of the absurd.
Zbigniew Warpechowski (b. 1938) is a performance artist, painter, poet and art theorist. Since 1967, he has created performances exploring the relationships between the body, language, gesture and presence. His practice encompasses experiments combining poetry, music and improvisation, as well as actions that confront audiences with the limits of physical endurance and raise questions about the authenticity of artistic expression.
In 1971, at Andrzej Partum’s Bureau of Poetry in Warsaw, Warpechowski presented Water, the first in a series of performances featuring a live fish. In the years that followed, his practice developed in various directions, from radical actions involving his own body to critical statements on consumer culture, media dominance and transformations in contemporary culture. He describes his artistic position as “avant-garde conservatism”.
Warpechowski was a member of the Kraków Group and the international group Black Market, which brought together artists associated with the pioneering era of performance art. His body of work encompasses hundreds of performances presented across Europe, Asia and North America.
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