Ewa Partum

Ewa Partum (born 1945 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland) is one of Poland’s most prominent conceptual artists from the turn of the 1960s and 70s, and was a forerunner of feminist art in Poland. She has created performances, activities in public space, experimental films, and visual poetry. 

 

Since 1969, Partum has been engaged in linguistic activities in an effort to discover a new artistic language. In the early 1970s, Partum conducted several performances in which she scattered letters from well-known works of literature in public space. Her most famous piece ‘Active Poetry’ (1971) was described at the time by the literary critic Marek Ławrynowicz as revealing ‘that a poet’s activity does not have to be reduced only to the verbal sphere, but can have a situational character as well’. The concept marked a turning point in Partum’s career and is one with which she has continued to play in order to critique the means and modes of textual production. 

 

Between 1973 and 1974, Partum created a number of short films called ‘Films by Ewa’, though she gave them one common title: ‘Tautological Cinema’. Through these films, she analyzed the problem of the automatism of the film medium and the structure of film language as a medium of semantics. Of the films and of film as a medium, Partum has said, "It’s not dealing with aesthetics. It’s rather a new sort of philosophical practice that operates in the area in which the relation between the film image and the camerawork covers the whole interest in the film itself.” 

 

Since 1983, Ewa Partum has lived and worked in Berlin. She was most recently awarded the Lovis Corinth Prize 2024 for her life’s work and held a solo retrospective at the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg in Germany. Prior to this, several retrospectives of Partum’s work have occurred, including ‘Ewa Partum: The Legality of Space’ (2006) at the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdańsk, ‘Self-Identification’ (2006) at Królikarnia – Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture in Warsaw, and ‘An Act of Thought Is An Act of Art’ (2001) at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe.

 

Partum’s works have been exhibited at Tate Modern, UK; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manifesta 7, Trentino; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Museum Voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Netherlands; MUMOK – Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna; Centre Georges Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; among others, and can be found in major institutional collections including the Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Generali Foundation, Vienna; and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.