03/12/2025
gathering
{Live}
Meeting with Agnieszka Mastalerz
- During a meeting in the Live series, Agnieszka Mastalerz will speak about her artistic practice. The artist will outline her creative process, in which everyday objects, images, shapes or social situations become impulses for initiating artistic work. At the centre of her interests lie the relationships between beings that are vulnerable to harm: people, plants and animals. In her projects, she examines structures based on hierarchy and moments in which abuse, coercion or control may occur.
- One example of this approach is the motif of plant supports, used both in botanical gardens and in mass cultivation. These rigid, often metal elements enable growth while simultaneously imposing its direction. In the artist’s work, they become a metaphor for the ambivalent relationship between support and supervision — between freedom of development and its architectural framing. The process of photographing these forms allowed them to be abstracted from their original context, and later transformed into sculptural objects. Rescaled in relation to the female body, they served as props in subsequent choreographic and film works.
- Agnieszka Mastalerz graduated from Mirosław Bałka’s Spatial Activities Studio at the Faculty of Media Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2018). She completed a guest stay in the studio of Candice Breitz and Eli Cortiñas at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Brunswick (DAAD scholarship, 2019/2020), and earlier in the studio of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg (2017/2018). She also completed cultural studies at the University of Warsaw (2013) and a postgraduate course at Malmö Art Academy (2024).
- Her works have been presented, among others, at the Ekrani i Artit Festival in Shkodër, at Królikarnia – a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw, at the Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław (2025), at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in Bucharest (2024), at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich (2023), at MOCAK – Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, at eastcontemporary in Milan, during Manifesta 14 in Pristina (2022), at Fabbri Schenker Projects in London, at MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato (2021), at Wschód Gallery in Warsaw (2020), at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, at the Starak Family Foundation in Warsaw (2019), as well as at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Fondation Hippocrène in Paris (2018). Her works have also been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, where she received a distinction in the Artystyczna Podróż Hestii competition (2017).
- She has been an artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2025), at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland, the Artist Development Programme at the European Investment Bank Institute in Luxembourg (2021), and at the Futura Gallery in Prague (Visegrad Fund scholarship, 2020). At the beginning of 2026, she will be in residence at Vila 31 Art Explora in Tirana, and in 2027 at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. She has also taken part in Lucy Artist Residency Talks in Kavala (2022) and the School of Expressions at PLATO in Ostrava (2019).
- Agnieszka Mastalerz’s works are included in the collections of, among others, Fondazione in Between Art Film Beatrice Bulgari, Ergo Hestia Group, the European Investment Bank, and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
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{Live}
- Every week, we meet live with artists to talk about art: creative processes, works, and current experiences.
- We host both artists who have previously taken part in Ujazdowski Castle’s programme and those making their debut. In this series, we would like to focus on individual approaches and artistic practices.
- Why take part?
- The events will be recorded for archival purposes, and the recordings will be made available online through the Mediateka.
- In times of tensions and crises, thinking and talking together about contemporary art – which responds to today’s challenges in unconventional ways – helps strengthen social resilience. Art is not only the object – just as important are the process, the thinking, the emotions, and the relationships that accompany it. The meetings offer a closer look at how art is created and, most importantly, who creates it.
- Every week, we meet live with artists to talk about art: creative processes, works, and current experiences.
- The meetings are open to everyone, from people working professionally in culture and art, to those who are curious about artists and their work, or simply want to talk about art.
- We do our best to make the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art accessible to everyone – we would like to adapt the event to you and your needs. To help us do that, please contact our accessibility coordinator: dostepnosc@u-jazdowski.pl, no later than the Monday before the event.
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