Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Maria Brewińska
collaboration: Katarzyna Kołodziej

Monika Zawadzki (b. 1977) creates simple forms, in the vein of traditional graphic design, using sculpture, painting, and video. One of the main themes of her work is the idea of identity creation, expressed through various universal and simple shapes. Zawadzki is preoccupied with issues of social exclusion or limitation, the mechanisms of individual functioning, alterity and corporeality, which she investigates from a broad perspective. She is also interested in the notion of transformation and its various aspects. She understands the ‘natural community’ of animate and inanimate matter as a symbiosis on the interpersonal level and on the level of relations with nature and civilisation.

Through her art, Zawadzki brings up the issue of the Other, manifested here primarily in the form of animals, attesting to our affection for them and transgressing the usual notion of love as an emotion reserved for human-to-human relations. She thus destabilises the anthropocentric paradigm, according to which man is the centre of all things, and the ultimate, perfect product of evolution. The continued reign of the anthropocentric model in the human studies means that other species, and their subjectivities, have been excluded from the field of academic knowledge. It seems, however, that the contemporary discourse around the love of the Other is embodied not only in the animal rights movement but also in a broader movement on behalf of all repressed Others. These various aspects of love find their expression in Zawadzki’s works, full of affirmation, as they are, that does not destroy the Other’s otherness.