Roman Dziadkiewicz
Roman Dziadkiewicz (b. 1972, Opole)
— artist, researcher, curator, mediator and poet;
author of theoretical texts, and the vibe-coder (and his cooking is fire🌶️).
Co-founder of StreamArtStudio
and the UKRAiNATV collective,
author of the stream-art (streamart / stream art) concept
and one of the coordinators of the
Stream Art Network.
He studied and obtained his PhD at the ️🙊
Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków️💥.
For years Rom has developed a practice stretched between
visual arts, performance, poetry, non-institutional education,
social activities, media and infrastructural experiments🧩🪂🔥.
Cuts, transmissions, mediations, negotiations and modulations
in the field of culture, fading signal, amplifications
and attenuations, improvisations, changes of plans,
plot twists, interventions from 🌈🪐 other time zones
and realities, feedback loops between the personal,
political, technological and creative🧬 —
these are the granular components constructing this biography.
{Btw, on April 12th we see each other on the Konfluxus
stream in Budapest💒, on 24-25th with UKRAiNATV in Krakow on Krakers Art Week,
next, in June - 5-7th, at the Kyiv ArtBookFair 2026, and then London and Amsterdam...
Stay tuned / safe dates and data ^^}
— now —
So, in the ongoing 🚨present (since c. 2020) Dziadkiewicz develops, researches
and tests through praxis with the
stream-art idea and formula,
which helps him repeatedly question singularity, the limits
of cognition, and the relations between the objective
and the subjective in the contemporary and future world.
Stream-art becomes a field🥔 of experiment with a new language
and new logic for hybrid, remote and post-platform practices
— local, glocal and global (and transversal)...
Stream-art is all about drawing creativity from environmental noise and movement,
shaped by collective immersion and the constant modeling and mediating of connections.
The circulation of meanings and content, subjects, processes
and objects — people, signals, images, sounds🌀, data,
avatars, objects and tools in real time that's the cosmos...
It is both a practice and a perspective: an attempt to understand
creativity in a world where studio, stage, laboratory,
archive and network overlap, and authorship disperses
between people, devices, interfaces, procedures and situations.
Instead of the capitalistic model of the solitary creator and the finished work,
a production kitchen appears — a director's table,
a tangle of cables, a green box, editing stations,
conversations, conflicts, improvisations,
shared responsibility and the working out of new rules
of co-presence ⚗️📺🍏.
Stream-art develops long-term, non-linear processes and activities
in which life and art constantly interpenetrate,
and creative practice shifts from the single gesture of the author
towards work environments, relations, power structures,
infrastructure and forms of communality.
In texts devoted to stream-art
Dziadkiewicz asks not only
about new media, but about new institutions,
new models of self-organisation, new ways of distributing content
and the authorship - a new concepts capable of describing the hybrid co-presence
of humans, non-humans, more-than-humans and less🪵... In this sense stream-art can be read
as the late fulfillment of many postulates that previously appear
separately: in relational aesthetics, institutional critique,
performance studies, archival practices, philosophy of the image,
experiments with collectivity, and in the long dispute about how
to understand agency, community, presence and authorship...
That is why the biography of Dziadkiewicz is a repeated passing ⚽
through different states of concentration and dispersal:
from poetry and the dismantling of meanings,
through performance and the movement of things in space-time,
social activities and institutional critique,
to long-term experiments with collectivity, relationality,
transindividual forms and the relations of humans with things,
objects, surfaces, landscape and technologies.
In this movement, the tension between the intimate and psychophysical
and the public, social, political and collective remains very important.
This tension is not resolved. On the contrary —
it becomes one of the main engines of the work.
Dziadkiewicz occasionally descends into his own grave
to check whether it is still empty, and returns to the surface
to build something again, or to blow it up 🗿.
In an interview
with Geert Lovink
he says: "Practice and theory are not opposed in my work,
and I consider both to be complementary ways of production
— of forms, units of information, energies, images and metaphors."
This is important, because Ensemble is not only a series
of performative activities. It is also a conceptual apparatus,
a system of notation, a way of working with dramaturgy,
documentation, text and body.
That is why texts such as
The Diagrammatics of the Ensemble. An Introduction
and Love – Freedom – Equality
do not function as after-the-fact commentaries,
but are part of the same (living) machine.
— 2022 —
In 2022 UKRAiNATV
launches after the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine
as a multilingual, hybrid ecosystem of production and support,
developed in Kraków by the internatinal crew and the wider community of collaborators associated with
Fundacja 36,6
"Latencja" and next the StreamArtStudio, and local undergrund🥕.
In the same year the GLOCARNO LATE NIGHT SHOW
as part of The Future of Attention at the
75th Locarno Film Festival,
Saturday Night Show realised with Carbon Residency,
and VsqaRe × UKRAiNATV at Milano Digital Week
— a collaborative environment between Kraków, Milan,
Strasbourg, Vancouver, and virtual spaces.
In UKRAiNATV'23, are Ksenia Mirgorodska, Nuarrrr, :
and the one and only Gleb Dovzhuk,
also amazing, fragile Giulia Timis,
Sofiia Reznichenko
and Azja Turcan, Faina Fisher, Konrad Wojnowski,
but also, still around: Olja Markul, Aliona Ivanova, Artur Zahreba, Nazarii Yurkov, Julia Ł. Mazur, Julia Sokol, Anastasiia Dyachenko,
Sebastian Brenk, Alina Bilecka, Maria-Viktora Gashinska, Denis Hryshchuk,
Erwin Jeneralczyk, Faina Malinovska, Shtasya Oleksiuk, Daiana Horbunova, Tymoteusz Ostrowski, Sonya Suprun,
Oleksandra Pryimak, Valeria Taranenko, Amanda Drozdz and many many others, (💕he loves you guys!)...
and Geert Lovink good spirit still around...
In 2023 UKRAiNATV develops further #EFIRs and their archives,
documents Geert Lovink's visit to Kraków,
organises Slay With Ukraine in Trondheim, works with Carbon Community
and partners from Kyiv, Amsterdam and Budapest (where the Konfluxus will born soon)
In 2024 StreamArtStudio and Stream Art Network expand
the network of collaboration with the
Institute of Network Cultures
in Amsterdam, CDI w. Michale Dieter at the
University of Warwick,
partners in Budapest (Konfluxus), Vilnius (3022 NGO), Trondheim, Kyiv, and Shostka,
and with the pacesetters.eu project.
In 2025 and 2026 Green Deal Studio / Anticipatorium enters the programme of
transmediale
in Berlin, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
as a pop-up studio and living installation
connecting Berlin with Budapest, Tbilisi and Kyiv (and back in 2026).
24.FE3.25 operates as a 24-hour multistream between Amsterdam,
Kraków, Tbilisi, Kyiv, Ljubljana, Budapest, Vilnius and London.
From 2023 a wild collaboration with the Chicks on Speed collective
is underway. 🍉The WatermelonStudios for the Utopia exhibition at
Museum Villa Stuck
in Munich was born and the dreamteam: Alex Murray-Leslie, Kathi Glas, Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir,
Sophia Efstathiou, Alina Belyagina and more, and the only one *ORLAN!*
appears together with Rom, Ksenia Mirgorodska, Gleb Dovzhuk, Sofiia Reznichenko (a core of the UKRAiNATV team in this moment).
Altogether, from 2022 to 2026, UKRAiNATV has realized nearly 200 stream-art projects,
featuring in numerous festivals and shows across Europe, the US, Australia, Canada, Poland, Ukraine, the UK,
Georgia, Hungary, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Norway.
And for sure some others too—it’s getting tough to remember them all...
But fortunately, Geert was alert to the pulse and developed this epochal -->HERE!
It should be added that geopolitical contexts, as well as
the cultural and political specificity of Eastern Europe,
constantly emanate from the background, discreetly defining
subsequent discoveries, choices, and failures.
— 2017–2021 —
But these experiments have a long tail (of Melusine)🐛...
If UKRAiNATV was born out of Russia’s rape of Ukraine, then stream-art
rendered and embodied itself in the psychedelic aurora
of oblivion somewhere between the early pandemic and the late splndr-era,
emerging from a mix of rap, stupidity, and dreams that are (still) unfulfilled.
— 2009–2016 —
In the years 2010–2016,
the central role is played by the formula of
Ensemble
— a proposal developed over more than a decade
for work on the border of performing, visual arts and
the most radical bodily-political experiments.
Ensemble refers to the idea of Balibar,
who draws on Marx, but is reworked through the experience
of temporary communities, failures of relationality
and attempts to move beyond the anthropocentric model
of relations and the aesthetics (and asthetisation) of participation.
Ensemble is not simply a group of people or a community theatre.
It becomes rather a performative dispositive🎪, a set of human and non-human #acts
co-producing a situation: bodies, gestures, objects, texts,
landscape elements, equipment, affects, scraps, accidents,
tensions and infrastructural conditions.
Authorship is constantly negotiated there,
roles rotate, hierarchies are challenged,
and forms of co-participation play out between engagement,
passivity, improvisation, direction, inertia and loss of control🎢🎡🌋.
In his English self-description Dziadkiewicz writes:
"Practice and theory are not opposed in my work,
and I consider both to be complementary ways of production
— of forms, units of information, energies, images and metaphors."
This is important, because Ensemble is not only a series
of performative activities. It is also a conceptual apparatus,
a system of notation, a way of working with dramaturgy,
documentation, text and body.
That is why texts such as
The Diagrammatics of the Ensemble. An Introduction
and Love – Freedom – Equality
do not function as after-the-fact commentaries,
but are part of the same machine.
In the years 2011–2016 the Ensemble formula crystallises
through concrete realisations and publications.
In February 2011 Dziadkiewicz (called Rom) defends his doctorate
Studium błota / A Study of Mud
at the ASP in Kraków under the supervision of
Prof. Artur Tajber.
In 2012 Roman Dziadkiewicz & Ensemble realise
Odmieńcy (Wojna)
as part of ArtBoom Festival in Kraków.
In the same year:
Orgia na koniec świata (jaki znamy)
at Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Bunkier Sztuki
in Kraków. In 2013:
The Diagrammatics of the Ensemble. An Introduction
in Sztuka i Dokumentacja.
In 2014:
Love – Freedom – Equality
in the volume Skuteczność sztuki,
ed. Tomasz Załuski,
published by Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi.
In 2015 Rom & Ensemble realise
Powierzchniologia (krajobrazy ze scenami idyllicznymi) / Superficiology (Landscapes with Idylls)
at the Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie.
— 2014–2015 —
Powierzchniologia / Superficiology a s-f
and philosophical book operates as one of the most
important nodes of this biography. The project develops
as an exhibition, a study and the final book🌚.
In his English self-description Rom writes
of "close encounters (touch, emotions) with the dead"
and of activating culture understood "holistically as an archive."
In practice this concerns concrete operations:
working with museum objects, archives, reconstructions,
landscape, iconography, looking, listening and the rhythm of perception.
Around the project appear the figures of
Wyspiański,
Jerzy Bereś,
Pawłowski,
Rosołowicz,
Maria Pinińska-Bereś,
Kraupe-Świderska,
Partum
and Warpechowski
as real points of reference, not decorative genealogy.
The surface operates here as a zone of contact
between image, body, museum and archive;
the book and the exhibition are part of the same process,
not separate entities.
— 2006–2009 —
A key moment remains
Imhibition (pl x en edition)
— a project developed in 2006–2007
at the Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie,
within the series Przewodnik,
in collaboration with
Ewa Tatar
and Dominik Kuryłek.
The project includes a Panel of Works
in the Gallery of 20th Century Polish Art
and a re-edition of
Emil Zegadłowicz's
1935 poetry volume Wrzosy,
copies of which are sent to selected individuals,
with one copy deposited in the museum for fifty years.
This is not general "institutional critique",
but a procesual investigation inside the museum:
with the storage, representation, memory, hierarchy
and mechanisms of the power (and weakness).
In 2007, during residency stays in Chemnitz,
Rom initiates Museum der Transformation.
In 2008 he participates in
Quer über Feld / Zur Topologie von Kunst
in Chemnitz alongside
Eduardo Molinari,
Olaf Nicolai,
Yin Xiuzhen and Hannes Rickli;
the accompanying publication gathers conversations with
Boris Buden, Celia Guevara, Vinzenz Hediger,
Yana Milev, Peter Richter and Song Dong.
In 2009 he realises
Under the Bridge
— eight interventions in the spaces of Gdańsk and Liverpool
— as part of the programme
Cities on the Edge /
Liverpool Biennial,
with Dorota Buczkowska, Elżbieta Jabłońska,
Łukasz Jastrubczak, Ross Dalziel, Kevin Hunt,
Meave Rendle and Rita Slater,
curated by Agnieszka Kulazińska, Kevin Hunt and Rita Slater.
— 2003–2006 —
In May 2003, together with musician
Wojciech Kosma,
he co-founds
Fundacja 36,6,
designed as a collective of artists and activists,
further shifting focus from art towards studying
the social, political and economic contexts of culture.
In 2004 he realises
Excursion to Kraków
with Zorka Wollny,
Mateusz Kula
and Michał Kowalski;
co-creates with Wollny the project
Still Lifes;
during Palimpsest Museum
at the Biennale Sztuki w Łodzi prepares
Kidnapping of the Curator;
during Re:Location Shake at CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk
works with the institutional memory of Łaźnia;
and in the same year participates in
Nova Huta
at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster.
In 2005 he realises
Robinson Crusoe or Stranger Than Paradise
at Spaces Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio —
a project consisting of eleven episodes,
in one segment of which
Noam Chomsky
appears (in a way xd). In the same year he develops
SFX: Audience
at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster.
In 2006 he participates in
Models for a Fictional Academy
at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest,
Czechpoint
at C2C Gallery in Prague,
How to Do Things
at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kyiv,
and in projects at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin
and Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków.
— 1999–2002 —
In the years 1999–2002
Stowarzyszenie Artystyczne Ośrodek Zdrowia (SAOZ)
becomes one of the first stable environments of this practice.
Dziadkiewicz leads SAOZ, works in parallel as an instructor
at Dom Kultury Podgórze, and in 2000 edits the publication
Projekt Wzgórza '000 / Projekt Hügel '000:
Lipnica Murowana – Kraków 2000.
In 2001 he takes part in Popelita at Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków.
In 2002: Germinations 13 – Get Out!
at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok,
Pieniądze szczęścia nie dają
at Galeria Manhattan in Łódź
and Look at Me / Spójrz na mnie
in Kraków. In March 2002 he co-founds spółka 36,6
and takes responsibility for its programme, gallery and club.
— origins —
Before all this: the formative years.
Opole, poetry, counterculture, punk energy,
late PRL and the violent transformation of Eastern Europe.
Studies in painting in Kraków —
which do not so much close him within the medium of image
as leave a lasting trace in his way of looking:
in later thinking about framing, surface, picturesqueness,
iconography, landscape, formlessness, mud
and work with hand, gesture, matter.
There is also a gradual turn towards social, communal
and situational practices,
which leads to the activities of SAOZ⛑️
and other environments on the border of art,
music, education and organising.
Language is not an addition or a tool for describing finished activities.
It is one of the main tissue of daily exploration (like biting your nails).
Poetry, rap, lyrics, lecture, working note, manifesto,
conversation, slogan, project title, swear word,
abbreviation, linguistic glitch —
all of this belongs to one circuit♻️.
Dziadkiewicz does not use language merely to communicate content.
Language is for him matter, cut, montage, interface🎠,
sometimes also a field of sabotage🥔.
That is why publications, books and texts
do not form a separate department called "writing",
but permeate projects:
The Diagrammatics of the Ensemble. An Introduction
orders and co-creates the Ensemble practice;
"Superficiology" is simultaneously book,
post-conceptual, speculative field🥔, post-material apparatus and extension of the exhibition;
the stream-art texts are simultaneously manifestos, songs,
methodological notes and post-institutional projects - prompts for himself.
Poetry is a method of abbreviation and condensation, like cooking...
Rap — a method of pressure, pulse, iteration and attack🥔.
Lyrics — a way of maintaining proximity
to what is fragile, barely graspable, almost private,
but never entirely separated from the violence of the world🥔.
Bc if you’re the cursor, he’s the precursor.
You’re the cursor, but he’s the precursor.
You’re the cursor, and he’s the precursor✨✨✨✨✨...
Born in Opole🥔, childhood spent in Prószków —
a baroque small town full of local myths and hybrid figures
such as Melusine, 🔮 the local loony bin in a castle, and the the apple research spot
in the environment of the multicultural and neo-colonially reversed
tensions of Silesia in the second half of the 20th century.
Educated in Kraków, from the beginning moving transversally
between disciplines and an-anarchist radical anti-discipline.
He does not recognise borders between creative work,
thinking, organising, teaching and intervening in reality.
Art is not here the production of objects, works or meanings
in capitalist regimes and journalistic opinions.
"Art is an intimate thing - stay Pink!"
It is an environment, an ecosystem🥔 of relations,
a workshop, a field of tensions,
a collective attempt at survival
and increasingly often a kindergarten of war —
mutual destruction in the fight for scraps of prestige,
a prototype of predatory relations
or an apparatus for studying social, cultural🥔
and political power structures.
Zero straightforward evolution, zero one line.
There are relapses, leaps, splittings, short-circuits,
meltdowns, returns from a different place and under a different name.
Motifs present in the most recent stream-art —
dispersed authorship, negotiating relations,
dismantling hierarchies, infrastructure as a battlefield,
co-presence of humans and non-humans🥔,
crisis of institutions, the need for a new code and new names
— do not fall from the sky.
These are old questions returning under the pressure
of new technologies, wars, platforms and social crises.
What earlier appears in relational art, performance,
institutional critique, work with archives, poetry,
lecture or field project, returns later in a different scale
and a different medium. Aaaammmeeennn...🥒
This text does not therefore arrange itself into a polite biography,
but into a map of tensions:
from intimacy to infrastructure, from mud to signal,
from body to data, from poetry to 🥔 (melting pot 🍲),
from a local environment to a dispersed network of collaboration.