Katarzyna Krakowiak
Katarzyna Krakowiak (1980) is an artist who creates sculptures, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations that investigate languages used to describe architecture. She carries a PhD from Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland and a post-doctorate from Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Poland. Her goal is to generate acoustic environments allowing viewers-listeners to become part of the artwork and encounter architecture at the level of sound. Exploring the borders of architecture, Krakowiak builds large-scale installations based on existing structures. She now focuses on formulating the concept of architecture in linguistic categories – as an imperfective verb and a space of becoming, which appears in different ways depending on its function, as well as on the sonic manifestations of human-nonhuman relationships. Krakowiak has been honored with numerous distinctions awarded by St. John’s College at Oxford University, Ministry of Science and Higher Education and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Poland, and the American foundation Trust for Mutual Education, among other institutions. In 2012, she received a special award for her exhibition Making the Walls Quake as if They Were Dilated with the Secret Knowledge of Great Power (curated by Michał Libera) in the Polish Pavilion at the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2020, she created the work It Begins with One Word. Choose Your Own at the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe. Her newest work, on current display at Jeu de Paume in Paris, is an installation Where does any Miracle Start, inspired by the sounds of insects often inaudible to human ears as well as their eerie presence and resilience. In the years 2019-2022 she led the Sound Space Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and since 2022 she co-leads the Interdepartmental Studio of Activities, which she runs together with prof. Mirosław Bałka. She lives and works in Otwock, Poland, and Oliva, Spain. She also identifies as a gardener, tuning in with and learning from the soil and plants on a daily basis. (2023)
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