Glej,
Alicja Rogalska: Collaborative Art and Post-Capitalist Speculation

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About the lecture

How can participatory art create spaces for reimagining economies, labour, and ecological futures? How do speculative rituals, role-playing, and collective storytelling open cracks in the dominant narratives of extraction, precarity, and crisis? In this session, we begin with a screening of The Feast (2022), a speculative dinner ritual set in a post-fossil fuel future, when humans harness energy created through their metabolism. The dinner guests reflect on the struggles of weaning society off dirty energy. Following the screening, the film’s author Alicja Rogalska will join us for a conversation on this as well as her other collaborative works, which bring together communities, activists, and workers to co-create emancipatory scenarios through workshops, performances, and live-action role-playing. Often translated into video works, her projects explore labour, migration, gender, and care, crafting experimental sites of solidarity and resistance. The discussion will be accompanied by short clips from her other films, including Dreamed Revolution (2016), NOVA (2020) and Terms & Conditions (2024), and concluded with a mini participatory performance in the form of a toast.

About the lecturer

Alicja Rogalska is a Polish-British interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin and London and working internationally. Her practice is research-led and focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday; she mostly works in specific contexts making situations, performances, videos and installations in collaboration with other people to collectively search for emancipatory ideas for the future. She recently presented her work at n.b.k. (Berlin, 2024), Biennale Matter of Art (Prague, 2024), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (2024), Biennial Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2023-24), New Contemporaries (London & Blackpool, 2023-24), Jogja Biennale (Yogyakarta, 2023), Urbane Künste Ruhr (Essen, 2023), Scherben/Berlin Art Prize (2022, main prize), Manifesta 14 Prishtina (2022), Temporary Gallery (2021-22), Kunsthalle Wien (2020-21) and OFF Biennale (2020-21). Rogalska is currently an artist in residence at the Villa Kamogawa / Goethe Institute in Kyoto and a PhD researcher in the Art Department at Goldsmiths College. She was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program in 2020-21, and an artist in residence at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2023), Faculty of Social Sciences at Essex University (2019-22), City of Women Festival (Ljubljana, 2019) and The Stuart Hall Library (London, 2019), amongst others.