Artist-led Warsaw: Notes on the Landscape of Independent Contemporary Art and Culture Production in the City

The lecture will focus on the landscape of contemporary art and culture production in Warsaw through the lens of Zazenski's multi-pronged, inter-dependent practice: as director of Stroboskop Art Space, founder and co-organizer of FRINGE Warszawa, and co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of MOST magazine. 

She will focus on the significance of artist-led initiatives and their critical role in cultural development, on founding and working collaboratively in multiple non-hierarchical structures and networks, and will also provide some insights as to the political context of Warsaw and how the cultural landscape has been shaped accordingly over the past decade.

Kathryn (Katie) Zazenski: artist, curator, writer, editor and lecturer whose practice is centered around cultural production in independent, artist-led communities. Since 2018 she has been directing the Warsaw-based independent art space Stroboskop, where she has produced over 40 exhibitions (including artists from both Poland and abroad) as well as hosted numerous artist talks and lectures on contemporary art in East and Central Europe. Through Stroboskop she has also co-curated and co-hosted several critical international partnerships with artist-led spaces, including with Superbien! in Berlin and MATCA in Cluj. Zazenski also works as an independent curator, with her most notable recent project being the solo exhibition of Patryk Różycki "I don’t feel nostalgia for the shame, but for our time together" at Gdansk City Gallery 1. In 2020, Zazenski began editing and writing for BLOK magazine where she was also producing the monthly column "Off-space Q + A", which functioned as an archive of artist-led spaces and projects of the CEE region. The column ran until November 2022, and in this time featured 28 unique spaces and remains one of the few resources documenting such projects in the region. In 2021, she assumed the role of co-editor-in-chief of the magazine alongside Vera Zalutskaya and Ewa Borysiewicz, which they stewarded until February 2024. The team formally resigned and in April 2024, together they launched MOST magazine, of which Zazenski is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief. In 2022, Zazenski also founded FRINGE Warszawa, an annual event that platforms artist-led, grassroots spaces and projects in Warsaw. In their first year they featured nine spaces in projects, in 2023 they featured 22, and in their most recent third edition (2024), they featured over 80, demonstrating the vital nature of such an event. Zazenski currently co-organizes the project with a small team, who are working to ensure that FRINGE remains a critical platform for independent contemporary art in Poland.

Zazenski has held lecturer positions in Europe and the US, including at the Art Academy of Latvia (LV), at Dartmouth College and Rutgers University (USA), and at the School of Form and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Poland). Zazenski received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (USA) and is a two-time Fulbright Program scholar in Poland, where she has lived since 2015.