Research Interests
Art and politics, cultural policy, censorship, artivism, cultural capital, immaterial labor, translocality, counter-monuments
Research Area(s)
Poland, Eastern Europe
Profile
I joined the Department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ as a PhD candidate in April 2024. Prior to this, I received my MA in Anthropology from the University of Leipzig and a Bachelor in Fine Arts (BFA) from Concordia University in Montreal.
My doctoral project considers bottom-up art venues as emerging sites of political engagment in Warsaw. Building on fieldwork conducted during my MA degree, I examine the organizational efforts of collectives and individuals as they create and maintain spaces in which the independent circulation and consumption of art, and subsequent counter-cultural public events, discourses, and networks become possible. Motivated by questions of how people create room for exercising agency towards new modes and horizons of instituting and belonging, this study develops a vocabulary around how citizens negotiate the limits of a preexisting cultural apparatus, when they do so by forging bottom-up structures of their own.
Alongside my doctoral work, I maintain an interdisciplinary art practice. I have attended art residency programs in Jersey Island, China, Germany, Poland, and Iceland and regularly exhibit my work locally and abroad. My forays in the art world and academic research continuously inform one another. I am a member of the collective studio space ‘Kombinat e.V.’ located in Halle 14, ‘Spinnerei’ in Leipzig.