The BWA Contemporary art gallery

PAIN GAME is a series of performative actions dedicated to individual and socio-political perspectives on pain.

Pain, approached neutrally as a symptom, illuminates spaces of (un)controlled tension and/or rupture. The manifestation of pain becomes particularly visible within unbalanced structures: power dynamics, institutions, relationships, (non-)hierarchical groups, and individual as well as collective bodies. This act of unveiling is inherently tied to risk. The discomfort of seeing, facing, confronting, and witnessing what we call pain may itself be worth the game. PAIN GAME suggests that pain is not treated here as something to be hidden or immediately neutralized, but rather as a tool to be tested through play.

The project emerges from the chronicity/inevitability of pain, mapped through personal experience. The inability to perceive pain is a fragile privilege.

The 4th edition is currently developing at BWA Katowice, with the participation of the institution’s working team, Milena Nowak, digital data, and D. Kowalik.

21 May 2026, 2:00–6:00 PM — performative action
22 May 2026, 6:00 PM — performative action featuring Digital Data

mariia Lemperk is an artist (they/them, she/her, he/him) from Odesa whose practice develops at the intersection of memory politics and the body. Recently, they have been focusing on (un)controlled spaces of pain, performative archives, questions of non-hierarchical structures, the deconstruction of gender, and the presence of queerness within today’s socio-political and cultural chaos.

Milena Nowak is an artist and researcher who combines visual computing and social design with a practice grounded in the body and materiality in the context of digitalization. In her current explorations, she focuses on issues of power, presence, and ritual, creating ephemeral sculptures and performative actions.

Digital Data is a sound and visual artist. His highly contrasting sonic language is at once raw chaos and a clear vision of the times to come. Often filled with frenetic grime and digital distortions, his sounds explore both technical contexts and personal emotions. They take us on a futuristic journey only to retreat into the realm of nostalgia. The artist finds in music and visual art a space for investigating emotions. His work resists aesthetic boundaries and manifests the complexity of contemporary experience.

Previous Actions

1st edition (institution + sexual violence)
Location: Goethe Institute, Kraków
19.12.2023, 18:00 – opening, processual action
20.12.2023 – BREASTMILK trio appearance
31.12.2023, 12:00 – noise concert, D. Kowalik and mariia lemperk
Curatorial support: Łukasz Trzciński

2nd edition (institution + evacuation)
02.07–01.09.2024
Location: Cloakroom gallery, Cricoteka, Kraków
Curator: Kamil Kuitkowski

3rd point (protest + walking cane)
16.09.2025 – noise concert, D. Kowalik and mariia lemperk
Location: Dresden
Organizers: dasKONZERTs

Sound Layer
bandcamp 31st
31.12.2023 – “PAIN GAME” noise concert, Goethe Institute Krakow
03.07–01.09.2024 – “PAIN GAME: second station” opening, Cricoteka
31.12.2024 – “PAIN GAME: second station” noise deinstallation, Cricoteka