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.
Our everyday experience consists of hundreds of unpredictable situations to which the mind and the body must react simultaneously. We function easier by creating systems, however, when the reality escapes the established frames we make decisions while improvising. Improvisation is not that much a matter of spontaneity and freedom, as of openness and readiness to constant changes.
Getting to know one's own motor abilities may create a starting point for the constant actualization of awareness, enabling the creative response to the changes in the environment. In the field of contemporary dance this problem was most thoroughly explored by contact improvisation, a technique to work with the body in motion initiated by Steve Paxton in 1972. It is based on a physical contact of two moving bodies and on mutual relation, created between them solely through the fundamental movement qualities – gravity, inertia, momentum. This practice, described by Simone Forti as art sport, contradicts the notion of the upright, vertical stance of the body as the superior posture in which we function in space, in the flow of movement which cannot be preconceived.
You come, we'll show you what we do is an exhibition on dance improvisation. The title is borrowing its name from the first US West Coast tour of contact improvisation in 1973. The title is also an invitation to actively participate in the exhibition, the concept of which assumes constant change whereas its program is filled with the events of various formats, encouraging one to move around in the unpatterned and unpredictable way. It will be encouraged by the interactive architecture of the exhibition, consisting of the devices for improvisation, designed by BudCud.
The exhibition in ms² shows the documentations of the performances from the 1970's until 1990's – films important for the development of thought on improvisation, understood both as studio and stage practice. They document the actions of such dancers and choreographers as Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson among others. The exhibition also includes the variety of performative events – workshops, presentations, performances/lectures – whose participants will challenge the spaces of the museum.
The exhibition will be encapsulated by the premiere of the book consisting of the translations of the texts which present improvisation from the practical, historio-analytical and philosophical perspective. It will be the first book on improvisation to be published in Poland and one of the very few publications concerned with contemporary dance that are available in polish language.
Invited artists: Ray Chung, Sebastian Flegiel, Natalia Iwaniec, Witold Jurewicz i Aleksandra Ścibor, Dawid Lorenc, Marcin Masecki, Yaniv Mintzer, Lisa Nelson, Iwona Olszowska, Jacek Owczarek / Pracownia Fizyczna, Jan Peszek, Michał Ratajski, Paweł Szamburski, Patryk Zakrocki, Ilona Trybuła, David Zambrano, Aleksandra Borys / Marysia Zimpel among others.
Curators/editors: Sonia Nieśpiałowska-Owczarek, Katarzyna Słoboda.
The book accompanying the exhibition will be published due to the financial contribution from the Institute of Music and Dance under the "2013 Publication Programme.