Roman Dziadkiewicz (b. 1972, Opole)
— artist, researcher, curator,
organiser of projects, poet and author of critical
and theoretical texts.
Co-founder of StreamArtStudio
and the UKRAiNATV collective,
author of the concept of stream-art
and one of the coordinators of the
Stream Art Network.
He studied and obtained his doctorate at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
For years he has developed a practice stretched between
visual arts, performance, poetry, non-institutional education,
social activities, media and infrastructural experiment.
Cuts, transmissions, mediations, negotiations, 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 artistic —
these are the granular components constructing this biography.
— now —
Currently (since 2020) Dziadkiewicz develops and researches
the idea and formula of
stream-art,
which helps him repeatedly lose 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, telematic and post-platform practices
— local, glocal and global.
Stream-art describes art and creative practice as movement:
the circulation of meanings and content, subjects, processes
and objects — people, signals, images, sounds, data,
avatars, objects and tools in real time.
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 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 new concepts capable of describing the hybrid co-presence
of humans and non-humans. In this sense stream-art can be read
as the late fulfillment of many postulates that previously appear
separately: in relational art, 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: "I lost twenty plus years doing art,
sabotaging myself and others because I was permanently
thinking in critical ways", and adds shortly after
that today stream-art is "increasingly less about art
and more about being a pure medium in itself."
This sentence sets the stakes well: it is not about abandoning art,
but about passing through it to the other side —
towards the medium understood literally,
as an environment of work, conflict, risk,
transmission and shared, always incomplete,
coordination of processes larger than us.
In this respect, stream-art is still an unexplored
and unpredictable reactor of processes that have already
exploded and wounded a few times,
but also give power, energy and motivation
for further experiments.
And given the development of the
Stream Art Network
in 2024, we are no longer dealing with one reactor,
but with a network of them.
— 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 Roman Dziadkiewicz,
Alex Posada
and the wider community of collaborators associated with
Fundacja 36,6
and StreamArtStudio.
In the same year: LOCARNO 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 SAN and UKRAiNATV materials, alongside Dziadkiewicz:
Michael Dieter,
Geert Lovink,
Gleb Dovzhuk,
Giulia Timis,
Sofiia Reznichenko
and Azja Turcan.
In 2023 UKRAiNATV develops further #EFIRs and their archives,
documents Geert Lovink's visit to Kraków,
organises Slay With Ukraine, works with Carbon Community
and partners from Kyiv, Amsterdam and Bratislava.
In 2024 StreamArtStudio and Stream Art Network expand
the network of collaboration with the
Institute of Network Cultures
in Amsterdam, CDI at the
University of Warwick,
partners in Budapest, Vilnius, Trondheim and Kyiv,
and with the pacesetters.eu project.
In 2025 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.
24.FE3.25 operates as a 24-hour multistream between Amsterdam,
Kraków, Tbilisi, Kyiv, Ljubljana, Budapest, Vilnius and London.
In 2025 and 2026 there is also collaboration with
Chicks on Speed
on the project Utopia at
Museum Villa Stuck
in Munich, where alongside Alex Murray-Leslie,
Melissa Logan and Kathi Glas appear UKRAiNATV,
Roman Dziadkiewicz and Alex Posada.
— 2010–2018 —
In the years 2010–2018, 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 and visual arts.
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 classical aesthetics of participation.
Ensemble is not simply a group of people or a community theatre.
It becomes rather 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 2011–2015 the Ensemble formula crystallises
through concrete realisations and publications.
In February 2011 Dziadkiewicz 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 Roman Dziadkiewicz & Ensemble realise
Powierzchniologia (krajobrazy ze scenami idyllicznymi) / Superficiology (Landscapes with Idylls)
at the Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie.
— 2014–2015 —
Powierzchniologia / Superficiology operates as one of the most
important nodes of this biography. The project develops
as an exhibition, a study and a book.
In his English self-description Dziadkiewicz 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
— 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 concrete work inside the museum:
with the storage, representation, memory, hierarchy
and mechanisms of power.
In 2007, during residency stays in Chemnitz,
Dziadkiewicz 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 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 fields of work.
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;
Powierzchniologia is simultaneously book,
conceptual apparatus and extension of the exhibition;
the stream-art texts are simultaneously manifestos,
methodological notes and institutional projects.
Poetry is a method of abbreviation and condensation.
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.
Born in Opole, childhood spent in Prószków —
a baroque small town full of local myths and hybrid figures
such as Melusine,
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.
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 streaming,
from a local environment to a dispersed network of collaboration.