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.
Urban Ecologies, the programme of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, explores the environment of a contemporary institution of culture embedded in the reality of a concrete city: Łódź in this case. Urban Ecologies reflect the self-awareness of an institution which fulfills its goals through continuous updating of the idea that is its building block, i.e., the avant-garde idea of art viewed as a laboratory, a testing ground for alternative ways of operating in the real world. They are prototypes of spatial and social solutions that turn our attention to locations considered abandoned or neglected. By being open to the co-engagement of the inhabitants of Łódź, they develop ethical bonds with the city.
Urban Ecologies are rooted in what is considered local; in activities that change everyday practices and build an interdisciplinary platform of cooperation available to various groups. Their goal is to work out a set of good practices exploiting the urban potential but challenging the rhetoric of novelty and turning towards sustainable measures.
Urban Ecologies are about how we think about the environment assuming we are aware of the presence and impact of species of plants and animals living on our planet. They are about challenging the nature–culture divide; a process consisting in making ourselves aware of complex relationships between living and non-living matter. This metabolism-based community cannot leave anyone indifferent to the complexity of relationships with the environment.
Urban Ecologies are tools of collective production of place-based knowledge; they promote the idea of bottom-up approach to urban planning and encourage to reflect upon and criticise the anthropocentric perspective on culture driven by an economic logic.
Curators: Aleksandra Jach, Katarzyna Słoboda
Coordinated by: Martyna Gajda (2011), Monika Wesołowska (2012), Beata Bocian/Monika Wesołowska (2013)
Urban Ecologies are about how we think about the environment assuming we are aware of the presence and impact of species of plants and animals living on our planet. They are about challenging the nature–culture divide; a process consisting in making ourselves aware of complex relationships between living and non-living matter. This metabolism-based community cannot leave anyone indifferent to the complexity of relationships with the environment.
Urban Ecologies are tools of collective production of place-based knowledge; they promote the idea of bottom-up approach to urban planning and encourage to reflect upon and criticise the anthropocentric perspective on culture driven by an economic logic.
Curators: Aleksandra Jach, Katarzyna Słoboda
Coordinated by: Martyna Gajda (2011), Monika Wesołowska (2012), Beata Bocian/Monika Wesołowska (2013)