KATARZYNA (KASIA) SLOBODA
Since 2009, I have been involved in curating and researching practices of contemporary art, choreography, and improvisation in the context of exhibition-making and participatory projects. I have edited several publications on dance, choreography, and contemporary art.
I hold a PhD in Dance Studies from the Institute of Art at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. My dissertation, Embodied Attention in Contemporary Dance Practices in the Perspective of Critical Dance Studies, was supervised by Prof. Krystyna Duniec. I have taught courses at the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Łódź, focusing on curatorial practices and the intersections of dance, choreography, and performance.
Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in Curatorial Studies at the Art Academy in Szczecin. Between 2009 and 2022, I was part of the curatorial team of the Modern Art Department at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
I am a member of AICA – International Association of Art Critics and the Common Space initiative. Between 2021 and 2025, I served as a Board Member of the Forum Association of Dance Art Societies, and between 2019 and 2022, I was a member of CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.
Together with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Ola Knychalska, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, and Kasia Właszczyk, I co-developed How to Touch Movement? Social Choreographies, Performance and Queer Feminisms as World-Making, a Kem School programme.
I am a recipient of the Grażyna Kulczyk Fellowship in the field of contemporary choreography and the Młoda Polska scholarship (2018). In 2018, I was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Dance Research at Roehampton University, London. In 2026, I graduated from the intensive course in experimental choreography organized by Centre in Motion / Burdąg Foundation.
Common Space is a non-for-profit, seminar/workshop-based collective. Initiated in May 2020, it has been set up as fortnightly meetings delivered in a non-hierarchical, online shared space. The method of our work is based on reading and moderated discussion around texts written by practitioners and researchers of the body movement. Its crucial parts are bespoke choreographic practices proposed by the group’s members and informed by working with imagination, drawing, attention, and word. The activity of the group is documented in the form of collective notes.
The key aims of the Common Space are:
● building a non-institutional community of creators based on care and trust;
● creating a possibility of exploration of individual and collective art practices;
● developing the language of the theory of movement and its crossover with practice.
The Common Space stems from a deep need for social solidarity and transition from an individual to a collective search for tools of creative cooperation, generating and sharing the knowledge and discourse around dance, performance art, and good practices of 'choreography of organizing from the bottom up'. The creative exchange of experiences not focused on obtaining tangible work places us in opposition to the common phenomenon of a cultural overproduction and has the potential of becoming both a source and a research apparatus, which could function also outside of the context of the pandemic. The initiative focuses on talking, critiquing, inspiring, and confronting various opinions.
We believe that creativity is a form of developing and maintaining bonds, a precious process, which is also time-, attention- and energy-consuming. The lockdown, the social distance regime, and the transfer of activities to the virtual space, have revealed the potential for a meeting placed outside of the currently existing structures. During the pandemic, the conceptual, collective work on the movement research enables us to develop practices in the time of impeded contacts and precarious status of female artists. We consider the diversity of our sensitivities, as well as experiences gained in many creative communities and places around the world, an asset that enriches the dynamics of our meetings and the self-organization of our group.
logo: Magda Wolnicka & visuals: Dana Chmielewska
drawings: Dana Chmielewska