Joanna Rajkowska
Born in Bydgoszcz, 1968 and lives in London and Nowogród, Poland.
Joanna Rajkowska (born 1968) is an artist based and working from London and Nowogród, Poland. In her work she uses objects, films, photography, installations, ephemeral actions, and interferences of various kinds. She produces architectural projects, geological fantasies, excavation sites, underwater sculptures and ephemeral actions. Not all are realized, but they often work as collective utopias. Most of her works happen, live and age in the public space. Thus, their matter consists of all entities involved as well as their relations, including organic and inorganic beings. She critically engages with the legacy, politics and aesthetics of land art and employs the strategy of unfamiliarity as a political tool. De-familiarizing, de-humanizing and relating are her operating devices. She is interested in limitations of human activities, multiplicity of agencies and human and non-human relations. Her public projects include commissions by CCA Zamek Ujazdowski (2007, Oxygenator, Poland), Trafo Gallery (2008, The Airways, Hungary), Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2009, Ravine, Poland), The Showroom (2010, Chariot, UK), British Council (2010, Benjamin in Konya, Turkey), 7th Berlin Biennale (2012, Born in Berlin, Germany), Royal Society of Arts, Citizen Power Peterborough programme’s Arts and Social Change, Arts Council England (2012, The Peterborough Child, UK), Frieze Projects 2012 (2012, Forcing a Miracle, UK) and Institute for Contemporary Ideas and Art (2014, Carpet, Sweden). As well as commissions, she has realized a number of partisan public projects, most notably Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue in Warsaw, 2002, a project that became a city landmark and shaped the unique set of methods Rajkowska employs while working with people and places. Her artwork has been presented in the UK, Germany, Poland, France, Switzerland, Brazil, Sweden, USA, Bulgaria, Palestine, India, Japan and Turkey, among others.
