Privacy Settings
curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher
KVOST presents the first solo exhibition in Berlin by Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska (*1974). The exhibition is a collaboration with Art Collection Telekom, which was founded in 2010 and focuses on contemporary art from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.
At the heart of Grzeszykowska’s work lies the exploration of the construction, fluidity, and inherent ambiguity of identity. Her practice plays with presence and absence, fragmentation, surface and superficiality—the outer image of the self and the inner perception of one’s ever-shifting sense of being.
Privacy Settings interrogates the dynamic tension between intimacy and exposure, authenticity and duplication, self-image and external gaze. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on their own “privacy settings” within a media-saturated reality. It offers insight into a variety of series created from the early 2000s to the present day, positioned at the intersection of photography, film, sculpture, and performance—raising questions of identity, visibility, and the constructed self.
The relationship between body, surface, skin, and mask—between the natural and the artificial image of the self—is explored in Beauty Masks (2017), in which the artist stages herself wearing absurd, commercially available beauty masks. These works reflect on rituals and ideals of beauty and self-presentation, as they have become standardised and widely disseminated norms on social media.
In more recent series, Grzeszykowska works with skin-like materials—pigskin and leather—stitched together to form representations of the body: masks, faces, and hybrid animal figures. These works provoke unsettling associations with a body that is wounded, flayed, or scarred. Mary Shelley famously gave no name to the creature in her novel Frankenstein, referring to it simply as “creature,” “wretch,” “being,” “daemon,” or “monster.” Similarly, Grzeszykowska’s works evoke human-made beings—akin to golems—while also referencing the erotic and fetishist connotations of masks and leather as second skin or bodily shell.
Negative Book (2012–2013) subverts the concept of “black and white,” presenting photographic negatives as final images. The artist painted her skin—and that of her daughter—black, documenting their daily life during an artist residency in Los Angeles in real time. Her daughter also features in the sculptural series Franciszka: white felt dolls that imagine her child’s body in the future. In Album (2022), Grzeszykowska revisits her family archive, digitally removing her daughter from photographs using Photoshop.
The Iranian Stills series was created in 2015 during a stay in Iran. It reflects the alienness of the clothing required of female tourists, while simultaneously evoking the glamour of the late 1950s and the aura of a Grace Kelly. A similar aesthetic can be found in the artist’s self-stagings in Untitled Film Stills (2006), in which she appropriates and deconstructs cinematic iconography. Here, Grzeszykowska performs the poses and tropes of Cindy Sherman’s iconic 1977–1980 photo series of the same name.
Aneta Grzeszykowska, born in Warsaw in 1974, studied graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her work is included in collections such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Museum Folkwang in Essen. In 2022, she participated in the 59th Venice Biennale.
