Katarzyna Perlak practice employs video, performance, textiles, sculpture and installation. Perlak’s work examines potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present continuous and past historical moments.
Katarzyna Perlak is a Polish born artist, based in London whose practice employs video, performance, textiles, sculpture and installation. Perlak’s work examines potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present continuous and past historical moments.
Through her work Perlak employs a notion of ‘tender crafts’, exploring how crafts (heritage and traditions) can be revisited and re-imagined from contemporary feminist, queer and diasporic (migrant) perspectives. She engages 'affective truths' such as myths, tales, dreams, desires, collective memories, and seek to problematise how history is written and traditions are represented.
Perlak background is in Philosophy, which she studied in Poland and Fine Art Media that she has studied in UK (Camberwell College of Arts and Slade School of Fine Art). She was part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017, and shows in the UK and internationally, including: Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennial, Art Night London, Jerwood Arts (SURVEY II), Leslie – Lohman Museum of Arts (NYC), The One Archive (LA), 2nd Brent Biennial London and 2019 Detroit Art Week (USA).
Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke
HD Video / 10:12 min / 2016
02:48 min excerpt
‘Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke’ (2016) film essay explores potentialities of queer utopias, while examining the relationship between history, “national values” and power structures. The work re visits Eastern European folk traditions and whilst employing a contemporary reading questions why queer love has never been preserved and celebrated in the folk history.
Niolam reclaims these stories and problematizes how history is written and tradition is represented, often only to sustain the power structures that claim it ‘objective’. This work encourages an experience of history as a discourse made out of multiple, overlapping and contesting narratives rather than a single, fixed entity.‘Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke’ locates queerness in Eastern European history; challenging the views that is an Western European export, which arrived in the post Cold War period.
Broken Hearts Hotel
HD Video / 15:12 min / 2021
01:17 min excerpt
Broken Hearts Hotel (2021) explores the potential of the "love hotel" as a temporary, utopian non-space in which we can reinvent love, relationships and ourselves, and holds tender correspondences filled with love, longing, desire, sorrow and heartbreak.
The work was commissioned for the Remote Intimacies, a series of performances organized by the Leslie Lohman Museum of Arts (NYC) and The ONE Archive at the University of Southern California (LA). The invited artists explored how to sustain intimacy in these highly mediated times, and how to imagine opportunities for communion across temporal and geographic distances.
Broken Hearts Hotel was premiered at a public online screening and conversation with critic, art historian and curator Pawel Leszkowicz, which followed two days of one-on-one virtual encounters with the artist, during which participants could choose to overshare broken heart histories, take an intimacy quiz, dance across the screen, or listen to a bedtime love story read just for them.
Film credits:
Director: Katarzyna Perlak
Co - Director: Sophie Ansell
Camera 1: Hicham Gardaf
Camera 2: Maja Ngom
Editor: Katarzyna Perlak
Stills Photography: Miroslava Vecerova
Costumes: Katarzyna Perlak, Sophie Ansell, Zahara O’ Brien
Stylist: Assia Ghendir
Sound Mix: Lottie Lou Poulet
Filming equipment: Surplus Sounds, Morgan K. Spencer
Commission curators: Jeane Vaccaro, Lexi Johnson, Stamatina Gregory, (The ONE Archives, Leslie - Lohman Musuem of Arts)