Katarzyna Perlak
— born in Chorzów, Poland; has lived in London, UK, since 2004. She has studied Fine Art Media at Camberwell College of Arts (2008) and the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2017). The artist creates installations and sculptural objects using fabric, as well as sound, camera and performance works, exploring folk, crafts and related micro-herstories, and hidden queer threads, referring to her realisations and actions as “tender crafts”. In her practice she employs video, performance, textiles, sculpture and installation. Perlak’s work has been acquired by Arts Council Collection and she was part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017. Her work has been widely exhibited, including Dreams and Desires, Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2024; It All Starts with a Thread, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2023; In the House of my Love, Brent Biennial, London 2022; No Tears Left To Cry, ORGAN VIDA, Zagreb, Croatia 2022; Poganki, Local 30 Gallery, Warsaw, 2021; Remote Intimacies, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York & ONE Archives, Los Angeles, 2021; Young Curators New Ideas V, Detroit Art Week, Detroit; I was, but just awake, Art Night, London, 2019; Tighten Throat and Butterflies, Metal, Liverpool, 2018; A Day of Learning, Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, London, 2017.
I grew up in Bytom, Upper Silesia, on an estate surrounded by forest and with heaps as our playground. A coal miner’s daughter. My mum worked at the market, which till nowadays slips to my work, both with modes of display and materials. Many objects that I use in my practice come from markets.
As a kid, I was much of a bookworm and it was only when I discovered my parents Zenit camera when my journey with arts unknowingly started. First via punk culture and anarchist theories I got into studying philosophy, at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Simultaneously while doing that I went into studying part time at the Uniwersytet Ludowy [Folk University] in Wzdów, where I was learning all from weaving, embroidery, ceramics, wooden sculpture, icons writing and more. Even though I went to study media afterwards, this experience had a significant influence on my future work.
My particular love for embroidery and textiles has also been passed on from my maternal grandmother, Agnieszka Ponanta, who fixed clothes and made her own hand embroidered and crocheted home textiles, like tablecloths, pillows, handkerchiefs, etc. It was also with my grandmother that I spent most of my summers in Korytnica, the village she came from. Those times and images often come back to me, and my work evokes tales of forests, whispered spells of cornfields, and echoes of spirits.
I celebrated this relationship in My Grandma’s Doilies (2022) work, a series of tablecloths originally made by grandmother, hand-printed with family photographs and further hand-embroidered with phrases and motifs that reflect on matrilineal inheritance, grief and queer identity. The tablecloths, invested with the communal labour of their makers, become a proxy for communion and conversation with a lost loved-one. Though held in a different time and space, the objects bear the mark of intergenerational touch, knowledge and absence.
In recent years I have been developing a ‘tender crafts’ methodology, which revisits and reimagines crafts, heritage and tradition from feminist, queer and migrant perspectives. I resonate with tender, as it speaks both to what’s soft, caring, with/in love and also sore, uncomfortable and painful. This also applies to archiving and what is being stitched to remember. There is a tenderness in capturing those moments. There is also tenderness in the time spent on making. Making space for yourself and others through the needle.
Bated Breaths (2020—ongoing), is a series of embroidered handkerchiefs that are forming a stitched archive, with twenty two completed works and new ones in the making. Each work presents a different proverb, saying or a quote, citing family, a friend, lover, or stranger. This series archives current and historical moments and considers how the formation of these phrases reveal intersections of personal histories, collective memory, and cultural etiquette.
The handkerchief holds many symbolic meanings relating to both personal and communal codes. Often seen as a tool for containing bodily fluids and emotion, it has also been used throughout history as a method of communication, ritualistically in traditional folk dances, and as a code for sexual preference in the LGBTQ community.
Crafts appeared in my art practice for the first time in the Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke (2016) film. In this work, in collaboration with folk singers, I created a fictional archive of queer love in Eastern European folklore. In EE, queerness has been portrayed as a “Western deviation” that has come to us, but not something that belongs here. Hopefully that narrative won’t stick for much longer and we are on the way to overcome that.
Archiving plays an important role in my work. I investigate the potentiality of affect as a tool for registering both present continuous and past historical moments and engage affective truths, such as myths, tales, dreams, desires and collective memories. Overall I seek to problematise how history is written and how traditions are represented.
My interest in representation of Eastern European heritage and tradition has been strengthened by my migratory experience. In 2004 I got on a bus to London, just a month after Poland joined the EU. It was supposed to be a temporary move, as I had just started a gap year at the University of Arts in Poznan. It extended though, and I have been here for twenty years now, which has formed much of my art practice. I continued my art education in London at the Camberwell College of Art where I did BA in Photography and later I obtained my MA in Fine Arts Media at the Slade School.
My current practice includes film, performance, sculpture, installation and textiles. I love working with all media and rather than focusing on one only, I seek to expand it, learn more and speak in other visual languages. At the moment I am very excited about drawing and painting and looking at a lot of sacral and so-called “naive” painters. I am interested in the relationship between Catholic, queer and folk aesthetics.
The text was written in collaboration with Romuald Demidenko (2024).
1Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Happily Ever After (2019), video still and installation view, M 1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, GOSSIP, curated by Agnieszka Ruguski, photo: Jens Franke. Courtesy of the artist.
2Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Happily Ever After (2019), video still and installation view, M 1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, GOSSIP, curated by Agnieszka Ruguski, photo: Jens Franke. Courtesy of the artist.
3Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Broken Hearts Hotel (2021), video still. Courtesy of the artist.
4Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Broken Hearts Hotel (2021), video still. Courtesy of the artist.
5Image: Katarzyna Perlak, darning and other times (2022), sculpture, installation view, Brent Biennale, In The House of My Love, curated by Eliel Jones Courtesy of the artist.
6Image: Katarzyna Perlak, her times (2022), sculpture, installation view, Brent Biennale, In The House of My Love, curated by Eliel Jones. Courtesy of the artist.
7Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Bated Breaths, 2020-ongoing, hand-embroidered textile. Courtesy of the artist.
8Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Bated Breaths, 2020-ongoing, hand-embroidered textile. Courtesy of the artist.
9Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Niołam Ja Se Kochaneczke, 2016, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
10Image: Katarzyna Perlak, Niołam Ja Se Kochaneczke, 2016, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
