Paula Malinowska
Swelling Petals, Counting Opacity

Paula Malinowska’s audiovisual installation presents a story of disturbingly intimate relationships between computational technologies and plant or human bodies, which become co-actors in a narrative where the boundaries between plant, human, and algorithm begin to dissolve. The artist develops a further stage of her research into CGI animation formats, 3D printing techniques, and the intersections of biology, anthropology, and digitality. In doing so, she works with the multiplication of both image and physical form, connected to the capture of movement that extends beyond the virtual space. Here, speculative fiction opens up questions of autonomy, surveillance, and simulation within relations of interspecies embodiment, shaped by the processes of digital and biological systems of power. How much sensitivity remains in the fingertips on a keyboard, and what is real in the gaze directed at a pavement from which, surprisingly, a daisy emerges?

PAULA MALINOWSKA works with digital media and photography. She is a graduate of the Department of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she currently works, and is also a doctoral student at the Department of Digital Arts. Her work has been presented at international group exhibitions and events, including House of Confluence (Governors Island, New York, US, 2024), Sentience (Voloshyn Gallery, Miami, US, 2024), Ctrl + ↑ for Coyote Time (Trafó Gallery, Budapest, HU, 2024), Fluid Coordinates (Grand Palais, Bern, CH, 2024), and Whoever settles in a perfect home will have to move (Glassbox, Paris, FR, 2023). Her presentations in Slovakia include the group exhibitions Will I Ever Look Into Your Eyes Again? (Šopa Gallery, Košice, 2024), Fossora (Bratislava City Gallery, 2023), and Disappearing Body (Schaubmar's Mill, SNG, 2021). In 2024, she was one of the laureates of the Oskár Čepan Award. In 2022, she won the open call for the Secondary Archive for women artists from the V4 countries (Platform for Women Artists from Central and Eastern Europe). She completed residencies at Residency Unlimited in New York (2024) and MuseumsQuartier in Vienna (2023).