Daniel Kotowski

Visual artist and performer, working across objects, installations, video and photography. In his practice, Kotowski delves into communication, biopower and biopolitics.

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Daniel Kotowski, photo Piotr Pietrus

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Daniel Kotowski graduated from the Faculty of Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Faculty of New Media Arts at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. He belonged to the Group of Deaf Artists, established in 2012 and bringing together around 30 members – professional artists, art students and amateurs. The group’s work, most notably the exhibition Sztuka Głuchych (Deaf Art) in 2012, contributed to increased institutional visibility of the Deaf in the Polish art world. Kotowski’s engagement in the group led him to start work at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, where he hosted meetings in Polish Sign Language until Janusz Janowski became the museum’s director. As an educator, Kotowski also collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

His early works were often objects and photographs that indirectly addressed his experience as a Deaf person. Kotowski focused on abstract notions (such as silence) rather than an embodied perspective, and used a formal language rooted in the postminimalist tradition. One work from the period, 2015’s Cisza (Silence), was an empty frame tied with thin strings in an attempt to illustrate the tensions and contradictions between experience and categories constructed in the phonic world. Another piece from around that time, Untitled (2018), was an object made of glass and stone, referencing Foucault’s notion of biopower, represented by the tension between two materials and their cultural connotations.

At that time, Kotowski also started to root his narrative in personal experience. The exhibition The Unreasonable Man Persists in Trying to Adapt the World to Himself (displayed at the Białystok Cultural Centre in 2018) can be considered a link between Kotowski’s early work and his later performative work. The artist appeared in the photographs and videos presented, though mostly pictured fragmentarily and covered by plants. In a sense, the body becomes inscribed into the metaphorical strategy as another ‘material’.

It is no coincidence that plants appear in the intimate self-portraits – raised in the countryside and sensitive to nature, Kotowski both sees his own reflection in them and plays with use of ambiguous metaphors. ‘My name is Daniel. Am I a plant?’, asks the artist somewhat provocatively. Although this may bring to mind the objectifying terms associated with ‘vegetation’, what Kotowski sees in plants is vitality and adaptability. A plant that simply changes the direction it grows in after it was broken mirrors how the artist perceives himself: ‘I feel shaped by being Deaf, but I don’t think it hinders my growth. … I am Deaf and I like it. I don’t want to be changed’.

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Daniel Kotowski, "I am Reading Aloud" 2019, video still

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A turning point in Kotowski’s practice came with the 2019 video performance I Am Reading Aloud. Having reached for performative tools, the artist shifted focus from metaphors to language and text. As a performance artist, Kotowski seems an heir of relational aesthetics. How different groups of spectators perceive the works is crucial, even when they don’t necessarily directly participate.

In I Am Reading Aloud, Kotowski stands in the middle of a meadow, wearing black clothes – a ‘uniform’ of both a contemporary artist and a sign language interpreter. The artist does not, however, use sign language. In fact, he tries to rein in his instinct to sign and reads the lyrics of Poland Is Not Yet Lost (the Polish national anthem) aloud. As Kotowski doesn’t use speech in his everyday life, reading aloud takes a lot of effort. For the hearing, Kotowski’s individual words are difficult to decipher, hence the choice of the national anthem – as its text is commonly known, a spectator can recognise it after listening closely for a while.

The national anthem reappeared in The Official Language of the Republic of Poland Is Polish, a work that Kotowski performed in several locations in Warsaw. Holding the constitution in his hands and carrying a megaphone on his back, the artist read a fragment of the Polish constitution containing the titular sentence. Foregrounding how the Deaf are forced to adapt to the verbal world and the fact that Polish Sign Language is not recognised as an official language, Kotowski shows what the fragment of the constitution silently slips in – that even persons born in Poland, in Polish-language families, may be excluded linguistically, or even unable to fully be citizens.

Verbal language is a physical challenge for the Deaf artist, and reading aloud becomes like an athletic feat. At times, it is disrupted by coughing. Kotowski balances between two groups and two languages, somewhat in a limbo – lack of translation into sign language renders his performance unintelligible to other Deaf people but at the same time his strenuous articulation makes the text difficult to understand for the hearing.

As the artist said in an interview for Culture.pl:

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The hearing often expect me to use speech. But when I do, they don’t like it; some even claim I’m disrespectful towards them and speech as such. Conversely, the Deaf believe I shouldn’t use speech because I’m a representative of this group, and someone could think I’m mocking them.

His choice of text was no coincidence – reaching for a constitution is inherently political.

Kotowski used his voice again in the performance Narzędzie do posługiwania się mową (A Tool for Speech), foregrounding the performative aspect of speech and phonic expression. This time, the artist stressed the role of the audience even more by reducing himself to a ‘living speech synthesiser’ that read aloud texts sent in by anonymous spectators.

Kotowski generally avoids using sign language in his practice – in an attempt to both reach a wider audience and avoid superficial interpretations of his work. One exception was the work Power of Women – a photograph depicting Kotowski showing a French sign language word for ‘feminism’. The sign went viral during the protests against anti-abortion laws in Poland in 2020, adding a new entry to the dictionary of opposition.

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Daniel Kotowski, "Delighting", performance, 2024, photo: Rina Nakano

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As the artist stressed multiple times, the hearing sometimes treat sign language as a kind of ‘dance’ or impressive pantomime, in effect reducing it to its aesthetic qualities. When he decided to finally use it in his work, Kotowski remained alert to this context and once more situated himself between different groups and analysed the way sign language is perceived by the hearing.

This was the theme of the video installation SIGNING/SINGING (2023), realised as part of the artistic residency programme organised by ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań's Imperial Castle. The artist repeated the sign for ‘sing’ in different sign languages and transformed it into evocative choreography figures, becoming a singer, a conductor, a speaker, and a queer interpreter all at once. The piece was performed in an office designed for Adolf Hitler, which added meaning to the work. In his choreography, Kotowski both referred to the style of the dictator’s speeches and fashioned himself into an object of desire.

Kotowski employed a similar strategy of interception and disarmament in his performance It Wasn’t Me Who Stole the Show (2023), given at the former bear enclosure at Warsaw Zoological Garden. The artist reached for freak show tropes and memes about sign language created by hearing – their tone mocking and frequently hinting at sexualised associations. Kotowski, dressed in a half-clown, half-ballerina costume, created a choreography based on gestures depicted in the memes, transforming it into a critical comment on the objectification of sign language. As he further explained in an interview by Karolina Plinta for Szum magazine:

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I decided to copy the gestures used in the memes. In fact, the text of the performance was created by the hearing who made those memes.

At the same time, it was the Deaf that understood the meaning behind the gestures and had fun, whereas the hearing spectators were confused and embarrassed.

The performance Delighting (2024), presented at Pickle Bar in Berlin and the exhibition Tears of Joy at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, yet again discussed the topic of aesthetic perception of sign language. Kotowski made references to the video work Wonderland by the Turkish artist Erkan Özgen, which depicted a Deaf boy narrating the experience of war in Syria and fleeing from his home country in sign language. Kotowski took a step back and looked at the artist looking at his subject, displaying how colonial the seemingly innocent focus on aesthetic and expression of gestures may be.

Another topic Kotowski tackled in his work is how the Deaf function in their closest relationships. As the artist noted, 90% of Deaf are born into hearing families, where most of the time none of the parents is fluent in sign language. In consequence, their communication is often limited to very basic exchanges and based on gestures created within the family rather than any official sign language. In the video Death in Everyday Life (2020) the artist looked into home sign languages, basing the work on interviews with 22 Deaf people from hearing families. Kotowski inspected how these spontaneous, insider communication codes depict death.

This subject matter reappeared in the show Love Ritual (2022) at the Komuna Warszawa theatre, realised in collaboration with dramaturge Alicja Kobielarz and performers Marta Abramczyk and Adam Stoyanov, appearing alongside Kotowski onstage. The show, focused on Deaf people’s private family stories, sometimes reverses roles and throws the hearing off their privileged position. As Anna Pajęcka wrote for ‘Dwutygodnik’ magazine:

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Is it a conversation? For a hearing spectator unfamiliar with sign language, it’s sometimes just an unintelligible sequence of movements. Suddenly, the hearing spectator finds themselves as a person whose understanding isn’t of particular importance.

Communication inequality is the main theme of the 2024 performance Scenography of Voices at Studio Theatre Gallery. The assumption that a Deaf person is automatically mute was debunked with an exaggerated metaphor – Kotowski became a ‘loudspeaker’ whose sounds were interpreted by hearing performers. Reversing the usual inequality, Kotowski does not aim to simply inverse the hierarchy but to unmask its absurdity and question it as such. Inspired by the books Głusza ( Stillness) by Anna Goc and Republika Głuchych ( Republic of the Deaf) by Ilya Kaminski, the artist reached for the story of the Bengkala village in Bali, Indonesia, where almost all residents, both hearing and Deaf, are able to use the local sign language called kata kolok, which is testament to the fact that it is possible for everyone to be on the same communicative level.

Kotowski’s latest works delve into different facets of his identity. Consistently challenging the audience’s expectations, Kotowski opposes being reduced to the role of a ‘Deaf artist’. His spectators become all the more important – Kotowski serves as a sort of mirror for them. In the performance Feeler, presented during the exhibition The Discomfort of the Evening in Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in 2022, Kotowski embodied the titular Feeler, dressed in a mask and a costume designed by Tomasz Armada. The performer asked the participants about their emotions and then tried to sing them – using a communication app that allowed him to have a dialogue with the hearing.

The project Liquid Tongues by Kotowski and Bogna Burska was selected to represent Poland at the 2026 Venice Biennale. The central part of the piece is a musical piece inspired by whale songs, intonated by Choir in Motion, a group made up of both hearing and Deaf performers. Liquid Tongues ventures beyond human means of communication to search for other-than-human communication methods. In concord with Kotowski’s entire practice, the language of the Deaf isn’t treated as an ersatz of the hearing language, but

in accordance with the idea of Deaf Gain, deafness is understood as [...] a separate culture and identity that grants new perspectives and forms of expression. A significant portion of the video and audio material was recorded in water – an environment where Deaf people can freely use sign language while the hearing emit distorted sounds. The barrier between air and water becomes a space of experimentation; a mirror where different languages, bodies, and modes of feeling meet.

The work continues the subjects Kotowski explored in his earlier art, including Bunt Głuchych. Odnowa (Deaf Rebellion: Revival), realised in Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 2025. The performance searched for understanding beyond phonic language and posed questions about the role of inclusivity and accessibility in the arts.

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