Weronika Zalewska

Visual artist, researcher and poet working in a variety of media: video, written word, sound and collective activities. Her art is focused on socio-economic transformations and their impact on cultural narratives and relationships. Born in 1994 in Ostrów Wielkopolski.

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Weronika Zalewska, photo: Alicja Lesiak

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Zalewska graduated from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Autonomous Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium. She also studied art praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. She currently lives and works in Warsaw.

Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Arsenał Gallery in Białystok, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art and HER Docs Festival. She is representing Poland at the Malta Biennale 2026 with her project Archive of Hesitations.

Zalewska collaborates with the Office for Postartistic Services (Bęc Zmiana Foundation) and belongs to the Luxembourg film collective and the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art. Alongside Ewelina Węgiel, Zalewska co-curates the film discussion programme ‘Common Goods’ at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The artist also programmed the ING Polish Art Foundation showcase ‘Screen’ (2025). Zalewska is the co-translator of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs into Polish (2020). In 2023, Zalewska and Dominika Wasilewska started the podcast ‘Post-Finitudes’, where they discuss posthumanism, feminist counter-catastrophes, and strategies for bypassing modernity.

Archive of Hesitations

Zalewska’s video art intersects documentary and speculative fiction, becoming a vehicle for exploring local communities and the way they interact with social, material and ecological changes. The artist also uses video to look into how human and non-human bodies are perceived.

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. Zalewska’s project represents Poland at the Malta Biennale 2026 as part of an exhibition curated by Ada Piekarska. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Galeria Bielska BWA are the organizers of the Polish Pavilion, in collaboration with the Polish Embassy in Valletta and the city of Bielsko-Biała – the Polish Capital of Culture 2026.

Emergency Kiosk

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Yulia Krivich, Marta Romankiv, Weronika Zalewska, 'Emergency Kiosk', photo: courtesy of the artists

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Zalewska, Marta Romankiv, and Yulia Krivich created a performative trio and set up the Crisis Kiosk in Hale Targowe, Gdynia, and Emergency Kiosk in Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The project was an act of solidarity with people directly affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine – both those living in Ukraine and people in other countries hit hardest with food shortages caused by the war. The three artists focused on information exchange and looking for ways to survive crises of food, energy, and other resources. As they propose, in times of crisis the importance of mutual aid and grassroots action becomes especially apparent.

Food recipes become fundamental to everyday activism, as ‘food holds memory, food holds colonialisms, but also struggles for peace and climate justice’. The artists invite the participants to cook Ukrainian recipes together and share the food. In return, they ask for participants’ own ‘recipes for survival’. The intergenerational recipes/tips are then written down in the kiosk and remain available in public space.

Science & art

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Weronika Zalewska, still from the video 'watch them pour out of the test tube', 2023, photo: courtesy of the artist

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For the video watch them pour out of the test tube (2023), Zalewska used the film footage she recorded during a visit to the Masaryk University Zoology Faculty, during her residency in Dům umění in Brno, Czech Republic. Zalewska spent long hours filming dead invertebrates floating in laboratory phials. The footage questions the ethics and aesthetics of science. Zalewska drew a parallel between the view of animals as research objects and watching her own tissue as study material during a biopsy.

Zalewska used video footage that juxtaposed toxic embodiment, medical experience, and more-than-human biopolitics in an exhibition that continued her research project – ruchome łuski naszych zwierząt (EN: our animals’ mobile scales), 2024. The exhibition explored how traces of history and politics are present in water, soil and chemical compounds. The artist examined how more-than-human bodies absorb, penetrate, and excrete substances – how they share earthly goods that provide sustenance and regeneration. The show, held in the Zamek Culture Centre in Poznań, was comprised of video works, textiles, paintings, and an in-situ installation.

Other topics Zalewska explores include the modern condition of post-Soviet experience (Light shards, 2023), receptivity and responsivity of artistic education in today’s complex reality (Today We Paint: A Window View from a Certain Standpoint, 2022), saliva as a hyperobject travelling through organisms and spaces (ślinne, 2022), and alternative tropes for a critical reading of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (The Fruit Was on the Public Side of the Fence, 2023). Following the thesis posed in Archive of Hesitations, the artist constantly questions commonly held beliefs, continually developing and discovering new complexities of the world.

intermedia art

visual art

ecology