Ewa Borysiewicz selected as critic-in-residence for 2024

Each October, MGLC hosts an international art critic in collaboration with the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory. In October 2024, Ewa Borysiewicz, an art historian, critic, editor, researcher and curator from Warsaw, is due to arrive at MGLC Švicarija. 

Ewa Borysiewicz will explore the contemporary visual art scene in Ljubljana and examine the role of empathy in art criticism in the relationship between the ethics of the individual and the evaluation of art. She will also pursue her latest interest, namely the dissemination of subjective narratives and their role in blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Ewa Borysiewicz is an art historian and researcher, who writes about art and organises exhibitions. She studied History of Art at the University of Warsaw and Freie Universität Berlin. She was a member of the curatorial team of Side by Side: Poland – Germany. A 1000 Years of Art and History (Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin), led by Anda Rottenberg, and is the author of Rausz kinetyczny (2013), a book exploring the political and emancipatory aspects of cameraless animation. From 2012 to 2019, she worked at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw as a curator for visual arts. From 2018 until 2022, she was co-organiser (with Stereo and Wschód galleries) of Friend of a Friend, a gallery-share initiative in Warsaw. In 2021, Borysiewicz edited the online iteration of the exhibition The Avant-Garde Museum, a cooperation between e-flux and Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. In 2022, she worked for Bergen Assembly as a researcher on the topic of coal sculptures from the Silesia region. In 2022, she took part in a visiting critics residency programme in Vienna and Graz, organised by Verein K. She has recently curated the solo exhibitions of Karolina Bielawska (Wschód, Warsaw, 2023) and Magdalena Łazarczyk (SKALA, Poznań, 2023). Together with Barbara Trojanowska and Kuba Woynarowski, she is preparing an exhibition about non-narrative storytelling in Japanese art and pop culture. Borysiewicz is the author of texts and catalogue entries. She has contributed to Flash Art, Art Agenda/e-flux Criticism, NERO, Camera Austria, SPIKE, PW, Texte zur Kunst and Art Basel Stories. In 2020, she joined the editorial team of BLOK Magazine. From 2021 until 2024, together with Katie Zazenski and Vera Zalutskaya, Borysiewicz managed BLOK as one of its editors-in-chief. In 2024, together with Zalutskaya and Zazenski as co-editors-in-chief, she launched MOST, an online journal with a focus on Eastern and Central European contemporary art and culture. Her current research interests revolve around neuroscience, theories of consciousness, epistemology, narratology, and behavioural economics. Her hobbies include ceramics, table tennis and video games.