ARTIST STATEMENT
Iza Koczanowska
1988, Poland
Koczanowska is an interdisciplinary artist and set designer who brings together research, archival materials, and interior architecture formats. Through specific locations and sociological and geopolitical contexts, she engages with and determines both the materiality and the media of each of her works. She primarily works with installations but also frequently engages with photography, treating it as a record of performative actions.By allowing technology to be one of her main tools for creating sculptures and immersive spaces, she animates environments and figures, revealing hidden and obscured elements.
Her work enhances interactivity as a tool to encourage the viewer not only to enter but also to become an integral part of the work, sculpture, or space. She also utilizes haptic illusion, blending various seemingly—or superficially—similar materials and elements that, upon touch, feel different from their initial visual perception. In doing so, she aims to subvert the idea of the artwork as a mere object to be touched. She further references the imitative qualities and artificiality that dominate and inform our contemporary reality.
Her practice engages with rituals, inherited or embedded superstitions, and the automation of personal behaviors, as well as the complex and varied ways in which different entities navigate and cope with reality. Responding to these observations, Koczanowska creates speculative realities and imaginaries while searching for alternative modes of spatial and temporal relationality. Subjects arising from social inequalities and dysfunctional public and private spaces—whose perception is shaped by external parameters that often reduce them to products—operate as vessels for exploring the present and its contradictions.
She utilizes elements derived from both the digital and physical realms, constructing structures that linger on surfaces—both conceptual surfaces and the surface of the body. She treats her subjects and materials as a way to trace and ultimately break down the boundaries between entities, suggesting that when brought together, they can enable multiple types of relationships to emerge. Scenographic design methods, small-scale models, theoretical and site-specific research all converge with her embodied experience, performative decisions, and outcomes. These components aim to uncover a universal structure that resists neoliberal systems, speaks nearby histories of dispossession, and grows through practices of alternative tourism and affect as a therapeutic construction.
Iza Koczanowska
1988, Poland
Koczanowska is an interdisciplinary artist and set designer who brings together research, archival materials, and interior architecture formats. Through specific locations and sociological and geopolitical contexts, she engages with and determines both the materiality and the media of each of her works. She primarily works with installations but also frequently engages with photography, treating it as a record of performative actions.By allowing technology to be one of her main tools for creating sculptures and immersive spaces, she animates environments and figures, revealing hidden and obscured elements.
Her work enhances interactivity as a tool to encourage the viewer not only to enter but also to become an integral part of the work, sculpture, or space. She also utilizes haptic illusion, blending various seemingly—or superficially—similar materials and elements that, upon touch, feel different from their initial visual perception. In doing so, she aims to subvert the idea of the artwork as a mere object to be touched. She further references the imitative qualities and artificiality that dominate and inform our contemporary reality.
Her practice engages with rituals, inherited or embedded superstitions, and the automation of personal behaviors, as well as the complex and varied ways in which different entities navigate and cope with reality. Responding to these observations, Koczanowska creates speculative realities and imaginaries while searching for alternative modes of spatial and temporal relationality. Subjects arising from social inequalities and dysfunctional public and private spaces—whose perception is shaped by external parameters that often reduce them to products—operate as vessels for exploring the present and its contradictions.
She utilizes elements derived from both the digital and physical realms, constructing structures that linger on surfaces—both conceptual surfaces and the surface of the body. She treats her subjects and materials as a way to trace and ultimately break down the boundaries between entities, suggesting that when brought together, they can enable multiple types of relationships to emerge. Scenographic design methods, small-scale models, theoretical and site-specific research all converge with her embodied experience, performative decisions, and outcomes. These components aim to uncover a universal structure that resists neoliberal systems, speaks nearby histories of dispossession, and grows through practices of alternative tourism and affect as a therapeutic construction.