Katarzyna Perlak, 'Broken Hearts Hotel' (2021)

Broken Hearts Hotel (2021) examines the potential of the ‘love hotel’ as a temporary, utopian non-space in which we can reinvent love, relationships and ourselves, and holds tender correspondences filled with love, longing, desire, sorrow and heartbreak.

Perlak’s forthcoming solo exhibition Better a bare foot than none presents her 'tender crafts’ series, exploring 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.

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).

In celebration of Valentine's Day, Broken Hearts Hotel will screen online for one month from 14 February 2025.

Film credits:

Director: Katarzyna Perlak
Co - Director: Sophie Ansell
Camera 1: Hicham Gardaf
Camera 2: Maja Ngom
Editor: Katarzyna Perlak
Stills Photography: Miroslava Vecerova
Costumes: Katarzyna Perlak, Sophie Ansell, Zahara O’ Brien
Stylist: Assia Ghendir
Sound Mix: Lottie Lou Poulet
Filming equipment: Surplus Sounds, Morgan K. Spencer

Commission curators: Jeane Vaccaro, Lexi Johnson, Stamatina Gregory, (The ONE Archives, Leslie - Lohman Musuem of Arts)