Agnieszka Kołodziejczak

A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and the University of Łódź. Recipient of a Norwegian government scholarship (2003/2004) at Kunsthøgskolen in Bergen. PhD in Humanities from the University of Łódź – an applied PhD in the field of accessibility standards for culture and the arts in Poland for Deaf people, to be completed in 2024. Project specialist at the FIDEES Social Ideas Foundation. Research assistant at the Department of History of Painting and Sculpture, Institute of Art History, University of Łódź.

She has extensive professional experience working in the academic, local government, non-governmental (setting up and running organisations and the social economy) and private sectors. Author and implementer of numerous pioneering initiatives and grants in Poland in the field of Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. She has participated in numerous open-air events and art exhibitions both in Poland and abroad. She is a co-founder of the Deaf Artists’ Group, the MEOK Gallery and the Ucieleśnienie Foundation.

She is passionate about painting, icon painting, writing, drawing, comics and collage. She loves discovering new craft techniques.

Rebellion as a strategy for visibility. Can art raise public awareness of the situation faced by deaf and hearing-impaired people?

This lecture explores the issue of rebellion against the status quo as an artistic strategy employed by Deaf artists to challenge the phonocentric norms of mainstream culture. The starting point is the question of whether, through artistic practices, it is possible to genuinely raise public awareness of the experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, as well as of the structural mechanisms of audism embedded in the public, institutional and symbolic spheres, including in the area of access to culture and the arts.

A form of artistic rebellion in Poland was the formation of the Deaf Artists’ Group in 2012 and the emphasis on the distinctiveness of the perspective of seeing the world as Deaf people through joint exhibitions of artistic works. Deaf art emerged in a similar way in the United States. Thus, for Deaf artists, the strategy of developing a way of being Deaf in their own way was, and continues to be, a kind of response to the frustration arising from the situation of being in-between and being someone who does not fully fit into the framework of the social expectations of the hearing world.

The paper will analyse selected creative strategies employed by artists such as Daniel Kotowski, Christine Sun Kim, Tomasz Grabowski and Nancy Rourke.

The paper situates these practices within the context of crip theory, Deaf Gain, and the concept of Deafhood, interpreting rebellion not as destruction but as an act of reclaiming Deaf subjectivity and redefining the relationship between the centre and the periphery of culture. Art appears here as a space for negotiating visibility and audibility — and at the same time as a field in which it is possible to shift social sensitivity from a paternalistic model towards a relational and partnership-based model.

This presentation is an excerpt from an original research project funded by Preludium 22 of the National Science Centre, entitled ‘Art by Deaf People in Poland – History and Analysis’.