Talk

BFA Visual & Critical Studies and SVA's Honors Program present Magda Szcześniak, who will discuss contemporary Polish art made by a young generation of artists (some of them still in art schools) that are connected with living in and working in post-industrial spaces—sometimes by the artists themselves and sometimes by communities they work with. Szcześniak’s main question here is the ways in which young artists address the socialist past and industrial heritage in a moment of growing disillusionment with neoliberal conditions (including the cruel practices of the neoliberal art and creative industry market). The three artists she will look at—Jaśmina Wójcik, Michał Szlaga and the fashion collective Dom Mody Limanka—address different aspects of these issues and have different ways of recuperating the socialist past. To RSVP, email art-pol@sva.edu.

Magda Szcześniak is an assistant professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, and 2019/20 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Critical Theory, Duke University. She is the author of Normy widzialności. Tożsamość w czasach transformacji (Norms of Visuality. Identity in Times of Transition, 2016), devoted to the role of visual culture in the post-socialist transition in Poland. She is also the co-author of the two-volume Kultura wizualna w Polsce (Visual Culture in Poland, 2017). She is a recipient of scholarships from the Fulbright Foundation (2010/2011, 2019/2020), the Polish National Science Centre and the Polish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, and the editor of the bilingual, online academic journal View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture. She is currently working on a book about the politics of representing upward and downward social mobility in socialism.