Mary Szydłowska, a choreographer and performer, sculptor and creator of video installations, was born in 1993. She focuses her creative explorations around cleaning practices. She has been living and working in Belgium since 2019.
She holds an MA from the STUDIOS programme at the P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts and Research Training Studios) contemporary dance school in Belgium and a BA in cultural studies from the Jagiellonian University, the University of Warsaw and the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. Her work has been presented and supported by, among others, the KANAL-Centre Pompidou museum in Brussels, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and Generation Brussels during the Brussels Gallery Weekend. She has taken part in the SNDO Intensive Course at the Academie voor Theatre en Dans in Amsterdam and the ATLAS programme at the ImPulsTanz International Dance Festival in Vienna (thanks to the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Flemish Department of Culture). She held a scholarship at the Alternative Dance Academy in 2019 and the Creative Scholarship of the City of Kraków in 2021.
In her artistic work, Szydłowska focuses on the various peripheral and ambiguous phenomena that occur within architectural spaces and institutional environments and the marginalised types of labour that might escape the eye. One example of these kinds of phenomena would the motion and practice of cleaning, to which Mary dedicated her work SOAK (created in 2021 as part of her degree at P.A.R.T.S.). At the time, she asked: ‘What if the broom were a weapon?’ – thus problematising the question of invisible labour as an indispensable part of patriarchal capitalism. One year later, she presented LEAKS – a performance and installation centred around labour performed manually and the causality of fluids, framed in the context of sanitising regimes characteristic of a world marked by a global pandemic (created as part of Generation Brussels – Brussels Gallery Weekend). SOAK and LEAKS can be read as a diptych that defines Szydłowska’s artistic interests and research.
On 25 and 26 November 2023, as part of the exhibition Akumulatory (Batteries) by the multimedia artist Marcin Dudek at the IKOB Museum for Contemporary Art in Eupen, Belgium, Szydłowska will present a performance titled Ionic. Accompanying Dudek’s exhibition, her work will allude to the performative qualities of the hairdressing salon as an example of a space where community can form spontaneously and which provides those who visit with an invisible emotional infrastructure. Cutting someone’s hair is, the artist argues, both a business transaction and an intimate encounter based on trust, exchange and loyalty. In Ionic, Mary Szydłowska will focus on the intimacy of touch and the cultural significance of haircuts and hair in general.