As part of this year's edition of the Persona Women's Art Festival, whose matron in 2025 is Jadwiga Stańczakowa - poet, editor and creative companion of Miron Białoszewski - visual artist Monika Mamzeta proposes the sculptural Portrait Company, a performative action in the gallery space in which the body, the form, the relationship between the creator and the model(s) will be closely intertwined.

Inspired by Witkacy and his famous portrait company, the artist will involve the viewer in the process of creating the work: not just as an observer, but assuming their co-presence.

The PERSONA Festival is motivated by the idea of disagreeing with the omission of women in the co-creation of culture. Jadwiga Stańczakowa - poet, editor, active participant in artistic life, despite her loss of sight, exceptionally relational, creative and causal deserves this patronage. Her relationship with Miron Białoszewski was a space of mutual influence, exchange and co-creation.

This is the goal Monika Mamzeta wants to achieve with the Portrait Company.

The artist has been working for years with self-portraiture, cultural roles and the figure of the female body as a site of symbolic play. In her realisation in the Elektor gallery space, she will shift the emphasis: from object to relationship. Her live sculptural actions will become not only a construction of form, but a moment of encounter, in which a representation is created out of the tension between the portrayer and the portrayed.

Against the backdrop of the work of Stańczakowa, whose life and work were shaped by blindness, but also by the immense power of contact, sensual existence in language and relationship, Mamzeta's actions will become not just an artistic gesture, but an affective experiment with proximity, intimacy, visibility and identity.

The aforementioned reference to Witkacy's Portrait Company in the form of Monika Mamzeta's work Hommage à Witkacy will translate into this artistic endeavour, which refers to both service activities and identity performance. Witkacy portrayed not only faces, but mental states, humours, personalities - to put it in strict terms, he made portraiture a form of play and a document of an encounter.
Mamzeta will transcribe this strategy into the language of contemporary visual art, combining performance, self-portraiture and sculpture to create a sculptural portrait company - an action performed live, in the presence of an audience and with the participation of specific people.

Mamzeta's actions will become a visual analogy of Stańczakowa's attitude - they will show that creativity is born not just from looking, but from presence. That a portrait can be a touch, a word, an agreement to coexist.

About the artist

She lives and works in Warsaw. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She holds a doctorate in art. She is also a graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of Warsaw. She completed her doctoral studies at the School of Social Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Study of Industrial Property Law at the Jagiellonian University. She has almost 30 years of legal practice. She works as an advocate and patent attorney in intellectual property cases (copyright, trademarks, industrial designs and patents). Author of the legal part of the Practical Guide for Artists (ed. Agnieszka Pindera, 2012). She has given lectures and training courses on intellectual property law. (...) Her works can be found in private collections and in the collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Article created: 24-04-2025

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