Monika Turczyńska
Artist and curator
Monika Turczyńska is an artist and curator working between Warsaw and Venice. Her practice moves between installation, exhibition-making, and conceptual series, often developing through projects in which the boundaries between artwork, spatial narrative, and curatorial structure remain deliberately fluid.
At the centre of her work lies an interest in threshold states: visibility and concealment, presence and disappearance, image and trace, authorship and role. Rather than treating the exhibition as a neutral frame for the work, Turczyńska approaches it as an active medium in itself — a site in which meaning is constructed through spatial relation, conceptual tension, and the choreography of encounter.
An important dimension of her artistic language is the use of natural materials, not as ornament, but as carriers of memory, fragility, rhythm, and transformation. In works such as Minoria, developed from shells, nature becomes both matter and meaning: a structure already marked by time, erosion, survival, and silent accumulation. Through such materials, Turczyńska builds forms that remain suspended between the organic and the symbolic, the found and the composed, the delicate and the enduring.
Her projects often operate simultaneously as works and as structures of thought. In this sense, curatorial authorship is not external to her practice, but forms part of its method. Turczyńska develops installations and exhibition formats in which identity remains unstable, roles may overlap, and the viewer enters a field defined less by fixed interpretation than by tension, resonance, and psychological presence.
This expanded approach is visible in projects such as Minoria, Trace, and Can You See Me, where artistic form and exhibition logic remain inseparable. Across these works, Turczyńska returns to recurring themes of perception, memory, fracture, concealment, and the conditions under which something—or someone—becomes visible. Her practice is marked by a sustained engagement with the exhibition as a space of symbolic construction rather than mere display.
Working across artistic and curatorial registers, Monika Turczyńska develops a body of work in which installation becomes a mode of thought and exhibition-making becomes a form of authorship. What emerges is a practice grounded not in fixed categories, but in the productive instability between them, and in a deep attentiveness to the symbolic force of matter itself.
Monika Turczyńska’s practice unfolds between art and curatorial authorship, not as two separate activities, but as interdependent modes of making. Her installations and conceptual projects are shaped by the conviction that an exhibition can function not only as a context for art, but as an artistic form in itself.
A recurring concern in her work is the instability of roles, identities, and forms of visibility. She is interested in moments when what appears clearly defined begins to shift: when the artist and curator overlap, when presence is carried by absence, when the image becomes a trace, and when the exhibition itself becomes a field of tension rather than a stable structure.
Nature plays an essential role in this practice. Turczyńska works with materials that already carry their own history, rhythm, and vulnerability. In Minoria, created from shells, the material is not passive; it becomes an active bearer of meaning. The shell functions at once as trace, body, fragment, protection, and remnant — a natural form in which fragility and endurance coexist. Through such materials, her work enters into dialogue with processes of erosion, memory, concealment, and transformation.
Turczyńska does not treat space as a neutral container. She approaches it as an active element in the construction of meaning, where sequencing, relation, concealment, and exposure all become part of the work. In this sense, her practice is less concerned with isolated objects than with the conditions under which something can be encountered, recognised, or withheld.
What defines her work is a sustained movement across thresholds: between artwork and structure, between visual form and conceptual proposition, between authorship and curation, and between the organic materiality of nature and the symbolic order of the exhibition. Through this method, Monika Turczyńska develops projects in which installation becomes a language of thought, and exhibition-making becomes a mode of artistic presence.