DOROTA BUCZKOWSKA. TRANSITIONAL STATES

As the artist writes about her own practice:

My artistic practice focuses on transitional states—moments in which the body, emotion, or matter still persist, while already undergoing transformation.

I am interested in the potential inscribed within transitional states—the tension that sustains them, even as their original form begins to disintegrate. Working with organic matter, paper, painting, and archival photography, I treat material as a carrier of memory and a physical trace. Figures in my works lose their individual identity and become anonymous vessels of emotion, while the form itself transforms into a shell, a remnant, a site of former presence. Rather than telling stories, my works create spaces for difficult, timeless conditions suspended between persistence and disappearance.

“Buczkowska’s project—entitled A Year in the Sanatorium—began with photographs taken from the boxes of street vendors; while searching for old postcards, the artist also found orphaned photographs at antiquarian stalls. On the one hand, they were legible, allowing poses and gestures to be recognized, forming certain narratives and configurations; on the other, they were torn from their context, often marked by damage, a tear, or a scar. Such damage to the materiality of the photograph—importantly, resulting not from the caprices of the photochemical process but affecting this very material layer—is used by Buczkowska as a point of departure.”

Text: Iwona Kurz, “Shadow-writing: The Poetry of Matter. Dorota Buczkowska and A Year in the Sanatorium”