In her artistic practice, Anna Karczmarska refers consistently and directly to issues related to gender identity and assumed social roles, as well as to the social rituals which determine the rhythm of life. Ever since graduating in 2005, she has been involved in a continual struggle with her own image, thus engaging in a debate on the performativity of gender and on the cultural gender roles.
– wrote Zuzanna Hadryś, the curator of Karczmarska's exhibition at the Arsenał Gallery in Poznań.
As the artist says, she ‘traces the performativity of "appearance" from the social, historical, and cultural perspectives.’ Her various costumes – in which she impersonates diverse characters, including the Virgin Mary (in the video-performance Revelation, 2007), Catholic saints (the installation 13 Holy Girls from 2005), fairy tale protagonists (Red Riding Hood in the photo and video project crops-preserves, 2006), an alien (the photographic series An Unknown Land – 12 Falls, 2007), and a lab technician (the Jubilee performance at the Witryna Gallery, 2008) – are acts performed in front of an audience which enables Karczmarska to create her artistic identity.
The artist also produces short 16mm films in which she tells the alternative histories of different places, such as in Someone Has Eaten From My Bowl (2010), Moszna (2013), and Das Staedtchen (2013, in collaboration with Wojtek Doroszuk). In her video The Duel (2008), Karczmarska challenges an abandoned tenement house at the corner of Targowa and Wileńska Streets in Warsaw. The building, located in a row of other ‘living’ edifices, provokes with its strangeness and dysfunction within the city fabric. As the artist described the building:
It is somehow handicapped, excluded, and proud at the same time, imposing, unmoved. One may think that it belongs to a different world, a world ruled by other laws than the ones we know and that we are a part of, and what we see is just a facade that exists there by accident, left there by mistake. This facade seemed to me to be a teleporter. A gate through which one may go to ‘the other,’ to enter ‘the other’.
Karczmarska staged a situation in which three actors – a woman and two men, representing a world different from the existing one – perform a ‘rite of passage.’ The female character's sex attributes are obliterated, she is deafened and blindfolded as she faces the house, which is similarly ‘castrated,’ with its wounds exposed.
Karczmarska is also the author of numerous performance works. In 2007, she created the cycle Revelation at the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw – for five consecutive weeks, on every Sunday at the same time, she displayed a figure resembling the Virgin Mary in one of the building's windows. In 2010, she also started creating so-called directed performances with actors, such as Scale with Paweł Smagała at the National Opera in Warsaw, The Concert After Crops with Krzysztof Kaliski at the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków (2011), and A Woman's Monologue with Ola Cwen, created while working on Garbaczewski's Odyssey. The latter performance later began functioning as a separate work, shown, among others, at Goldex Poldex in Kraków and at the exhibition The Length of the Reins Determines the Diameter of the Arena at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole.
Since 2005, Karczmarska has been working in theatre. She has collaborated with leading Polish directors, designing sets and costumes for stagings which have included Barbara Wysocka's Szapocznikow – No Gravity (2014) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Krzysztof Garbaczewski's Sports Choir (2008) at the Kochanowski Theatre in Opole, Possessed (2008) at the Dramatyczny Theatre in Wałbrzych, Nirvana (2009) at the Polski Theatre in Wrocław, and Odyssey (2009) at the Kochanowski Theatre in Opole; Jan Peszek's Hamlet (2010) at the Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts, The Marriage of Figaro (dir. Cezary Tomaszewski, 2010) at the National Museum in Kraków; as well as Michał Borczuch's COMPOnents (2004) and Lulu (2007) at the Stary Theatre in Kraków, Leonce and Lena (2007) at the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw, The Evening of Orphans (2008) at the Festival of Dialogue of Four Cultures in Łódź, The Picture of Dorian Gray (2009) and The Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf (2010) at TR Warsaw, Twelfth Night, or What You Will (2010) at the Kochanowski Theatre in Opole, and War's Unwomanly Face (2012) at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf.