Ewa Zarzycka. Unreal Life – A Case Study

The next action will be 𝐄𝐰𝐚 𝐙𝐚𝐫𝐳𝐲𝐜𝐤𝐚’s performance ‘𝐔𝐧𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 – 𝐀 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲’.

The artist writes about this action: ‘My performance will be the kind where I face the audience.

Basically, everything will take place on a verbal level – my narrative positioned within a situational and temporal framework created by me.

In which the verticals, the level, the horizon of events, the passing of time and the main axis of my narrative are so important. The story being told.

It is an attempt to bring my extremely subjective cosmos into contact with the cosmos in which we all live. An attempt doomed to failure from the outset. Nevertheless, my decision is to undertake this futile effort. Because the problems of presence and absence are important to me, especially in the context of the art world. Where fulfilment and non-fulfilment are also so important. I feel part of the art world, so I intend to present the main themes of my art that are important right now. And, perhaps most importantly, to reveal my doubts.

Ewa Zarzycka October 2025

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𝐄𝐰𝐚 𝐙𝐚𝐫𝐳𝐲𝐜𝐤𝐚 is a conceptual artist who practises performance art, including a special form known as spoken performance, as well as drawing as a record of her own texts, diagrams, maps and charts. She creates objects, videos, audio recordings and installations. She lives and works in Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny. She has been involved in performance art continuously since the 1980s. She studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts (1973-1978), now the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, where she lectures on Processual Actions and Performance in the postgraduate programme Mediation and the Art Market.

She is the winner of the Katarzyna Kobro Award at the Museum of Art in Łódź 2024. Her works can be found in the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Wrocław – Four Domes Pavilion, Józef Robakowski’s Exchange Gallery, the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Contemporary Art Museum in Wrocław, Zachęta in Warsaw, MOCAK in Krakow, Andrzej Ciesielski’s My Archive Foundation and Zachęta Lubelska. She is a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, as well as the cities of Wrocław and Lublin. Documentation of her work can be found in the Secondary Archive / Artists of Central and Eastern Europe, Saga Archive in Switzerland.