Residensstipendiat i Malmö 20 februari – 22 maj 2024

Monika Czyżyk (she,they) is a Polish visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She works primarily with dirty media: moving images, VR within the context of experimental documentaries and socially engaged projects. She collects clay from a variety of places and uses it to create spiritually driven clay window paintings. Her ongoing body of work expands upon a form of techno-sublime aesthetic, exploring human and non-human scales, sonic disruptions, impossible landscapes, and ungraspable truths. Czyzyk’s working methodology is divided into travel-led and site-specific research and studio practices based on Vartiosaari island in Helsinki, where they run Vartiosaari Island association. She considers the island as an active partner and collaborator in all her projects.

Foto: Daniel Kilgus

Monika Czyżyk

During her IASPIS residency she will continue working on the project called Almanach in collaboration with composer Neil Luck. Almanach is a visual, performative, musical, and fundamentally tentacular project, manifesting in several outcomes of different forms, digital film, sound recordings, live performance events, VR environments and clay paintings. She will investigate complexities between Polish-Swedish history and study its manifestation in landscape painting as a starting point of her process.

Monika Czyzyk obtained her MFA in time and space department at University of the Arts Helsinki and in painting at Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Art in Krakow. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals including Sequences biennial, Reykjavik (2023), Sinne gallery, Helsinki (2023), Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2023), Floating University, Berlin (2023), Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki (2022), Bilsart, Istanbul (2022),the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan (2021), the Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw (2019), C5 Art Space Beijing (2019), the New Media Society, Tehran (2019), African Artist Foundation Lagos (2018), the WRO Biennale, Wrocław (2017) and at UnionDocs, New York (2016). She was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Studio & Research Residency Siena, Amant Foundation 2021, and Institute for Provocation, Beijing, 2019.