Curator, critic, educator, and cultural life animator, primarily associated with Galeria Bielska BWA. Piekarska has curated numerous group and individual exhibitions, including displays of Polish art at international events. She is one of the organizers of Bielska Jesień – Poland’s most important painting competition.
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and art history at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Piekarska weaves social activism into her curatorial practice. The exhibitions, meetings, discussion panels and guided tours she organises always situate art in a broad context. Piekarska is interested in the social functioning of art and artists, possibilities of renegotiating fossilised exhibition and critical formulae, and reflection on art as a sphere influenced by institutional power (artistic universities and art galleries). In 2024, Piekarska received the Jerzy Stajuda Prize for Art Criticism, one of Poland’s most important distinctions for critical and curatorship endeavours. As the verdict read, Piekarska was awarded for her ‘consistent work for the popularisation of critical art and the development of institutional public programmes’.
The show Battlefield, displayed in Galeria Bielska BWA in late 2020/early 2021, was among the first significant exhibitions curated by Piekarska. It featured works of Katarzyna Górna, Robert Kuśmirowski, Kasper Lecnim, Jan Możdżyński, Dominika Olszowy, Liliana Zeic, Mikołaj Sobczak and other artists. Thematically, the exhibition’s focus was the polarising conflict for the right of interpretation of the past and, subsequently, production of history interpretation. As Piekarska noted, history is never given or objectively inscribed in archives, but always actively created by a dominant ideology and political powers that produce their own mythology. The exhibition title suggests that the debate regarding national foundational myths, system-legitimising traditions or the most important historical paintings that still shape the collective imagination is an ongoing dispute that can never be either coherent nor resolved.
Similar themes reappeared in Mikołaj Sobczak’s solo exhibition, Blue Wheat, curated by Piekarska in Galeria Bielska BWA in 2022. Sobczak inspected the complex history of Polish-Ukrainian relations and showed how in the Second Polish Republic the figure of a Pole was constructed in opposition to ethnic and national minorities. An installation resembling an iconostasis presented Sobczak’s paintings, executed in a variety of experimental techniques, which drew on the tradition of Polish painting and the overlooked histories of modern-day Polish-Ukrainian borderland. The exhibition form as such was crucial to its content. The gallery space, now resembling a temple interior because of the iconostasis and decorative frescoes on the walls, revealed itself to be an institution that enables public debate, sets its tone and constructs the most important notions, just like the interior of a temple or a church is a place where attitudes and identities are reproduced. Recurrent themes of Piekarska’s curatorial work – the mission, responsibility and power of an institution – are also clearly visible here.
At Galeria Bielska BWA, Piekarska is also involved in Bielska Jesień – the most important showcase of new Polish painting, mapping its most exciting current developments. Its 2025 edition sparked intense public debate, most notably over Małgorzata Mycek’s exhibition and win. Piekarska’s curatorial involvement extended to taking responsibility for the public reactions to the showcase. Bielska Jesień became an opportunity to reassess the basic premises of artistic competitions, the requirements artists need to fulfil and the most fundamental notions like taste, value of artworks and technical skills. As Piekarska wrote:
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The jury awarded Małgorzata Mycek for ‘a brave rewriting of countryside visual geography – sensitive, ironic and political – that redefines it as a space of resistance, community and queer imagination’. I agree – Mycek lives in Radoszyce, away from the urban centres of prestige. Their practice is rooted in a specific life geography. Mycek rejects the easy tropes: romanticisation and a paternalistic attitude. The countryside is not presented as a reservoir of national innocence or an ethnographic museum of ‘folk aesthetics’ but as a space of political and intimate thinking, a space where queer imagination is not an intruder. We need to note that Mycek graduated from the University of the Arts in Poznań and is currently studying at the Folk University of Artistic Crafts. They don’t lack ‘technical skills’ – they deliberately chose an artistic language. Anyone who believes Mycek ‘cannot paint’ should closely inspect their output, which clearly displays a consistent decision to reject the prestigious distance that Polish academic art often sells as the only requirement for being ‘a serious artist’. Mycek is capable of painting ‘nicely’ – and this is precisely why they refuse to do so. [...]
‘What about the tastes of the audience?’, I hear. My reply is: taste is not an innocent category. As Bourdieu noted, taste is a tool of power. In the art field, ‘mastery’ is often a means to enter the symbolic centre: the notion dictates who can enter and who is supposed to stand at the door. When art appears that deliberately does not use prestigious language, these doors lose their hinges. Suddenly, it is impossible to clearly distinguish ‘those who know’ from ‘those who do not know’. This is why the reactions are so heated: the debate is about social position rather than aesthetics.
When someone writes: ‘this is not art because that is not how a real painter paints’, what I hear is a declaration of status, not a judgement about artistic value. It is a proposition to go back to the model of painting as a decorative authority. This is not something we should do in 2025, after a century of conflicts about the role of painting as a battlefield rather than a mirror of the dominating forces. Painting that fails to evoke a public reaction and rearrange collective imagination remains a mere interior decoration. Mycek does not decorate. Mycek opens up a new space. [...] To be absolutely clear: the claim that Mycek cannot paint is false. They can paint. They choose not to use a conservative language. Refuting virtuosity may be a stronger gesture than demonstrating skill. As we can see, this turned out to be so controversial.
In 2026, Piekarska is responsible for the Polish Pavilion at Malta Biennale – an exhibition co-organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Embassy in Valletta and the city of Bielsko-Biała – the Polish Capital of Culture 2026. Piekarska curated Archive of Hesitations by Weronika Zalewska. The video installation Archive of Hesitations plays on the convention of a TV quiz show and uses it to analyse contemporary methods of assessing and organising knowledge. The format, normally associated with lighthearted entertainment, is presented here as a mechanism that for years shaped the collective imagination, enforcing a belief in unambiguous answers, clear criteria and immediate evaluation. Popular in Poland in the 1990s and early 2000s, quiz shows may be linked to the modernisation attempts of the era – an effort to catch up to the West, even at the cost of local traditions, and a thoughtless acceptance of everything the West has to offer, capitalism and mass culture included. In her memories of watching TV quizzes with her grandma, Zalewska also finds a retreat from traditional knowledge transmission. First and foremost, Archive of Hesitations is a work about our modern times and the habit of looking for clear-cut answers. Zalewska ventures out to destabilise this order and install hesitation in it – a quality that is at the heart of creative thinking. She poses questions that reach beyond a single correct answer.
