Katarzyna Perlak Better a bare foot than none
Exhibition Events
Opening:
Thursday 6 March, 6–8pm
Further Information
Katarzyna Perlak’s 'tender crafts’ series explores how heritage and traditional handwork practices can be re-imagined from contemporary feminist, queer and migrant perspectives. Her approach reflects experiences of shared precarity, and what it means to belong. Focusing on vernacular stories, proverbs, and collective memories, Perlak embraces statements that offer ways of surviving, and finding pathos in what is lost or miscommunicated in translation.
Perlak’s Pajaki sculptures, a starting point for the exhibition, are a material manifestation of Polish tradition. The paper chandeliers, also known as 'spiders', are hung to protect the home, and are historically crafted for Christian, Pagan and folk celebrations. Weaving together materials of kitsch ephemera, Perlak’s Pajakis entangle these traditions with a queer aesthetic of abundance to make visible their complicated lineages. Considering the contradictions within problematic social movements in Poland, as well as her own longing for home, Perlak utilises the feeling of nostalgia to imagine new possibilities for the future.
Katarzyna Perlak’s exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (2025); V&A Museum, London (2024); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); B3 Biennial of Moving Image, Frankfurt (2023); Brent Biennial, London (2022); Jerwood Arts, London (2021); Detroit Art Week (2019); BALTIC, Gateshead (2017); Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017).
Marysia Więckiewicz-Carroll has organised and curated numerous exhibitions and projects in Ireland and abroad, independently and in partnership with various institutions and local authorities, including Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane and Irish Museum of Modern Art. She was a co-editor of Paper Visual Art Journal, and the founding director of Berlin Opticians Gallery. This exhibition is supported by an Arts Council Project Award.