The BWA Contemporary art gallery

PAIN GAME forms a series of performative actions dedicated to individual and social perspectives on pain. The personal experience of artist Maria Lemperk, who serves as the project’s medium, whose everyday life is marked by the variable pain graph, provides a starting point for sharing her perspective on individual experiences of pain or the conditions under which it functions in social space. Pain, consistently exorcised from it and part of a cynical market game (the same corporations produce weapons and painkillers), is an inherent element of reality. PAIN GAME does not propose fixed rules of the game; the meeting place for mapping perspectives on pain is a specially designed meeting table, which travels with the project. Each participant who joins the game proposes new rules, overwriting subsequent layers of experience on its surface. In PAIN GAME, the individual perspective and experience of pain are important, as are the social dimensions of its presence, including its (in)visibility. A crucial element of the project is the processual work with visual documentation of the actions, as well as the consideration of the auditory perspective of perception.

Each time, both the board and the game pieces are reinvented, in response to the diagnosed spectrum.

The PAIN GAME table frame, collectively transported by the BWA Katowice team, awaits new versions of the pain game in the gallery space after its performances at the KUNS(Z)T Gallery run by the Goethe Institut Krakau (2023) and CRICOTEKA – the Tadeusz Kantor Museum (2024).

mariia Lemperk – an interdisciplinary artist/curator with a practice evolved on the edges of memory and body politics. their recent interest focuses on the (un- and) controlled pain environments, collective grieving, performative archives, non-hierarchical togetherness issues, gender deconstructions and presence of queer in the political and cultural chaoses of today.