Events
mariia Lemperk (and all persons involved) “Kissing a Rock”
Tuesday, 4 August 2026, exhibition opening
16:00 Lotny Dom Wydawniczy
18:00 participatory performance actions
“Kissing a Rock” is a series of performative actions and (post-)artistic situations developed by mariia Lemperk in relation to various places, spaces and entities. The iteration presented in the former BWA Katowice Sculpture Gallery is devoted to the modernist art institution. Treated as a stone, it brings us closer to understanding the culture-forming role of architecture, infrastructure and matter, which are inseparably connected with the experience and existence of our bodies.
The exhibition-as-process is conceived as an action unfolding through multiple voices and gestures.
mariia Lemperk is an artist (they/them, ona/jej, on/jego) from Odesa (Ukraine), whose practice develops at the intersection of the politics of memory and the body. Most recently, they have focused on (un)controlled spaces of pain, performative archives, questions of non-hierarchical structures, the deconstruction of gender, and queer presence in today’s political and cultural chaos.
An event within the “AESTHETIC CONGRESS” programme — a year-long series of exhibition and performative events aimed at updating the formula of the art institution, realised through the involvement of diverse, complementary artistic languages and tools, and with the participation of artists and curators. The primary point of reference, and at the same time the starting point, is BWA Katowice — an institution embedded in the centre of the city’s urban and social fabric as a tool of social engineering. The modernist pavilion, now a listed architectural monument, is a contemporary of the beginnings of the Polish wave of institutional critique. The need to update it spatially and ideologically becomes a starting point for a discourse on the meanings and dynamics of the art institution understood in universal terms. For the duration of the project, the main exhibition space will transform into a year-round art laboratory. Historical works will enter into dialogue with entirely new ones, forming a collective reflection.
curator of the AESTHETIC CONGRESS — Łukasz Trzciński
Photo documentation of the performance actions (photos: M. Niglus):
