Malgorzata Dawidek

Małgorzata Dawidek has developed her creative and academic practice from a cross-fertilisation of disciplines, including literature, anthropology, archaeology, selected aspects of philosophy and humanistic medicine. Her work is based on historical research and archival materials, which inform her photographs, drawings, installations, texts and performances. Studying museum collections, artefacts, maps, and medieval manuscripts, the artist analyses the narratives, politics and imagination of the human body and the ethics and aesthetics of the iconography of vulnerability. Exploring the techniques of working with her own body, language and environment, she poses questions about the ways of depicting illness, pain, anxiety and loss; reviews the canons of representations of the diverse bodily states accepted in contemporary culture; and develops visual forms of soothing, tenderness, care and thriving. Creating a space for potentiality and positive categories in the area of border experiences, she also elaborates her original concepts of bodygraphy and affective artistic practice.


Holding two PhDs—in Art History (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) and in Fine Art Media (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London)—she combines a rigorous a...

2015-2024: PhD, Slade School of Fine Arts/UCL, London

2004-2009: PhD, Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

1997-2002: MFA Painting (1st Class Honours), Academy of Fine Arts, Poznan, Poland

1996-2001: MA, Art Education/Drawing (1st Class Honours), Academy of Fine Arts, Poznan, Poland

Selected Solo Shows

2020 - Notations, performance, and video-essay, Centrala Gallery, Birmingham, UK – online show

2018 - Foreign Body, The Old Stable Gallery, VARC, Highgreen, UK

2017 - Biomety and Other Stories, Entropia Gallery, Wrocław, PL

2017 - Bodygraphy, Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń, PL

2014 - The Topography of Intimacy, The Art House, Wakefield, UK

2014 - Circle [performance art], Aula Gallery, University of Art Poznań, PL

2011 - Fold-ups, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław, PL

2011 - te[k]sty/te[x]sts, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, PL

Selected Group Shows:

2020 - The Signature Art Prize, Somerset House, Autograph Collection Bankside Hotel, Londyn, UK

2020 - Contested Spaces, Foundry Gallery, Londyn, UK

2019 - Humanising Medicine, Bart's Pathology Museum, Londyn, UK

2019 - Illness as a Source of Art, National Museum in Poznań, PL

2019 - Caressing History, Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi, India

2018 - About Me, Loosen Art, Rome, IT

2017 - Illegibility. Palimpsests, Pan Tadeusz Museum, Wroclaw, PL

2016 - Jerwood Drawing Prize Exhibition, Jerwood Space, London, UK

2016 - A Place, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, PL

2016 - DADA Lives!, Blue Ash Gallery, Cincinnati, USA

2016 - Illegibility, The Art Station Foundatio...