10/12/2025
gathering
{Live}
Meeting with Karolina Jarzębak
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Our guest will be Karolina Jarzębak – an intermedia artist and researcher of internet culture, working at the intersection of digital art, speculative narrative and traditional craft. Her practice grows out of a particular sensitivity to phenomena emerging within networked ecosystems: from iconoclastic forums such as 4chan and local memetic niches like Karaczan, through virtual sociospheres like Second Life or Discord, to the dark archives of online micro-histories and abandoned images.
- She treats the internet as a living archive of inconsistent narratives, half-truths and digital glitches – a contemporary novel collectively built by anonymous users. In her work, she investigates the phenomenon of performatively constructed self-esteem, the fear of missing out, the paranoia of scrolling and the affects of loneliness that shape growing up in an age oversaturated with stimuli. She is interested in the materiality of memory, the iconography of sadness and the nostalgia for a world that never existed.
- One of the foundations of her practice is the dialogue between the online sphere and the physical world of craft. Raised in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, a town with a strong furniture-making and religious tradition, she transforms internet threads through techniques such as marquetry, treating wood as an analogue data carrier and a method of manual deconstruction of contemporary mythologies. Her digital works and material objects function within a single network of meanings, in which uncertainty, signal overproduction and a deficit of sense become the basic creative matter.
- In 2023 she won the Grand Prix of the Bielska Jesień competition, and her curatorial work includes co-running the open space 404 and the independent gallery Jak zapomnieć in Kraków. Her works have been presented in institutions such as Zachęta, BWA Bielsko-Biała, XXI Gallery, Raster Gallery and Cricoteka, as well as at exhibitions and events including Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Szara Kamienica, and MeetFactory in Prague.
- In recent years she has carried out projects such as Samozaoranic, Moving Image, I am living in your walls and They are sharing memes you couldn’t even fathom, consistently exploring the tensions between what is networked and what is bodily, domestic and handcrafted.
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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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