The Sculptresses is a duet that transforms exhibition space into a living archive of female lineage, resistance, and presence. It was commissioned by Marta Szymańska of the National Museum in Warsaw’s Department of Cultural Projects for the 2023 exhibition Sans corset — curated by Dr. Ewa Ziembińska in collaboration with Alicja Gzowska — and developed as part of the ongoing research initiative Polish Women Sculptors of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
This three-year curatorial and research project aims to rediscover and contextualise the work of Polish women artists, in part through their relation to the French cultural field. Conceived within this broader framework, The Sculptresses was created and performed by Weronika Pelczyńska and Magda Fejdasz, drawing on the legacy of 19th-century women sculptors who defied artistic and societal norms, such as Camille Claudel, Hélène Bertaux, and lesser-known Polish figures like Tola Certowicz or Maria Gerson-Dąbrowska. Though many of these women were active, successful, and recognised in their time, their stories and works have too often been overlooked or obscured.
Now, The Sculptresses re-emerges in a new iteration for Nuit Blanche Paris 2025, hosted by the Polish Institute in Paris. This site-sensitive, French-language version invites the audience into a drifting, living archive. As part of Nuit Blanche Paris 2025, the Institut Polonais in Paris and the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture present two events exploring the legacy of 19th-century female artists through movement and memory.
On Thursday, June 5 at 6:00 p.m., the Institute, currently residing at 86 rue de la Faisanderie, will host a panel discussion followed by a performance of The Sculptresses, featuring curators and choreographers reflecting on how dance can expand the museum experience and support the transmission of women’s artistic heritage.
The following evening, Saturday, June 7 at 8:00 p.m., The Sculptresses returns in a full-length, French-language performance, presented as part of Nuit Blanche. This site-sensitive work, created by Weronika Pelczyńska and Magda Fejdasz, invites the audience into a drifting, embodied archive of female lineage and solidarity. Admission is free, but registration is required.
Rather than reenact history, the choreographers embody it. Through breath, tension, and shifting weight, they craft a shared language of resistance, care, and presence. Their movement unfolds alongside a hypnotic soundscape by Natan Kryszka — a Polish saxophonist, sculptor, and painter — whose music deepens the sense of embodied memory and reverberation. The work doesn’t seek to smooth over contradiction, but to let it resonate, much like the women artists it honours: figures who shaped not only clay and stone, but new ways of being, remembering, and creating together.This conversation explores the artistic processes behind The Sculptresses, the conceptual and physical labour of building performance from memory and matter, and the political urgency of female solidarity in motion.
Patrycja Poznańska: Your performance is described as a “performative archive” of female bonds and individuality. How did you begin translating such a complex idea into movement and form?
Weronika Pelczyńska: We started by working on ourselves literally. We trained at the gym three times a week to prepare our bodies not just to lift and support each other, but to become material – a sculptural matter. This physical preparation was also a conceptual entry point into the language of sculpture: through weight, breath, and relational tension.
At the same time, we worked with somatic practices to activate the body as a living archive, a place of stored memory, experiences, and relationships. Later, we moved into contact improvisation, treating each other simultaneously as sculptors and raw material. Each form was born out of dialogue: through touch, resistance, attentiveness, and flow. In this way, we shaped a shared, supra-individual figure, a body in constant transformation. A form that for us embodies care, strength, resistance, and sensuality. Choreography became a way of working with memory and movement, and also with the question: how do we maintain individuality while in relation? How do we sculpt one another without losing ourselves?
“The dramaturgy emerges from contact improvisation. It’s not illustrative, but relational — shaped by physical negotiation, by touch, resistance, shared weight, and shifting roles.”
— Magda Fejdasz
P.P.: In The Sculptresses, there’s a strong tension between strength and sensuality, independence and interdependence. How do you choreograph these opposites without falling into cliché or binary thinking?
Magda Fejdasz: We’re interested in unfixing binary concepts — stretching them, letting them collide and co-exist within the body, gesture, and presence. Strength can be subtle. Sensuality can be a form of power. Independence doesn’t preclude closeness, just as interdependence doesn’t erase agency. The Sculptresses is a duet, a meeting of two distinct bodies, temperaments, and artistic sensibilities. Each of us brings a personal archive: our own way of being present, of moving, of relating. We don’t try to smooth over our differences. Instead, we allow them to resonate, creating a shared choreography that honours both divergence and connection.
The dramaturgy emerges from contact improvisation. It’s not illustrative, but relational — shaped by physical negotiation, by touch, resistance, shared weight, and shifting roles. Choreography becomes a space of tension, attuned to what in sculpture is unstable, ambiguous, and alive. The piece evolves through different performer pairings. Each iteration opens up new textures, informed by the uniqueness of the bodies involved. In Paris, I’ll perform alongside Dana Chmielewska, in a version featuring new costumes by Monika Nyckowska. Each presentation reframes our questions through new energies, dynamics, and presences.
P.P.: The piece engages with the legacy of 19th-century women sculptors like Camille Claudel and Hélène Bertaux. What drew you to these figures, and how did their struggles and artistry shape your choreographic language?
W.P:. It all began with the Corset off. Camille Claudel and Polish Women Sculptors of the 19th Century, an exhibition curated by Ewa Ziembińska in collaboration with Alicja Gzowska at the National Museum in Warsaw. The juxtaposition of Claudel and Bertaux with lesser-known Polish sculptresses, such as Tola Certowicz, Antonina Rożniatowska, and Maria Gerson-Dąbrowska, offered us a powerful point of departure. These were women who entered spaces not made for them. Their fight for visibility and access to artistic education resonated deeply with us.
Their sculptures and their biographies felt like unfinished sentences. We were especially drawn to how they created their work and how they related to other women in the field. Bertaux, as an artist and activist for women’s education, touched on the very subject of sisterhood that drives us. Claudel intrigued us with how her sculptures embodied the presence or absence of the other, forming bodies in tension and contradiction. Their work taught us that the female body doesn’t just need to be represented, it can itself become a site of resistance. In our choreography, we sought those same curves, breaks, and unresolved gestures, a language that doesn’t have to be polished but is deeply present.
“The Sculptresses is as much about their stories as it is about ours. It’s a space where female heritage, historical and contemporary, becomes embodied.”
— Magda Fejdasz
P.P.: The title of the exhibition where your performance premiered – Sans corset – evokes both physical restriction and social constraint. How does your performance address the act of “removing the corset” — of unbinding the female body in art?
M.F.: Within the exhibition’s context, the corset symbolised the system: the social, class, educational, and aesthetic constraints historically imposed on women. But our focus was less on the symbol itself, and more on the women who moved beyond it — sculptors with strong, distinct voices, who lived and created through very different paths.
We were drawn to the act of embodying their sculptures — entering and exiting specific forms as a way to not only bring their works into the present, but to foreground the authors themselves. The 19th-century sculptresses we referenced were not just “removing the corset” symbolically; they used that gesture as a site of transgression, autonomy, and artistic definition. We see this unfastening not as an escape from form, but as a redefinition of it — transforming a mechanism of control into one of agency.
P.P.: And much of this work centres on female lineage — was there any personal resonance with your own histories as women or as artists?
M.F.: Absolutely. The question of female lineage resonates deeply with us, both personally and artistically. Since 2018, we’ve been developing the idea of sisterhood practice in close dialogue with other women artists. Through shared projects, we explore how connections between women — their solidarities, frictions, and complexities — can be given space and voice.
In The Sculptresses, we deliberately invoke the names and works of lesser-known sculptors like Ewa Kulikowska, Tola Certowicz, Helena Skirmunt, and others, many of whom remain marginalised in dominant art historical narratives. We wanted their identities and creations to be not only referenced but spoken aloud, embodied, and made present. Bringing this piece into an international context, like the performance in Paris, adds another dimension. We’re aware that Polish names can be difficult to pronounce or remember, and that’s exactly why it feels urgent to say them, again and again. To give them space.
We’re not only speaking about the past. As choreographers working today, we’re acutely aware of the invisible structures that continue to shape our field — the hierarchies, the biases, the exclusions. The Sculptresses is as much about their stories as it is about ours. It’s a space where female heritage, historical and contemporary, becomes embodied. Not a retrospective, but a living archive: shifting, breathing, ready to be reimagined.
P.P.: The discussion on June 5th focuses on how choreography mediates museum experience. What do you think performance can do that a traditional exhibition cannot, especially in terms of emotional or bodily engagement?
W.P.: Performance disturbs order; it breathes, shifts, and enters into direct contact with space and audience. For us, the museum was not just a backdrop, but a partner. We worked within its rhythms: in the corridors, between the galleries, for chance viewers and staff. Choreography allows the artwork to be experienced in time and through the body. A sculpture stands still while our bodies move, take risks, and support one another. In this way, performance becomes a transient archive, one that imprints itself not only in memory but in the viewer’s body.
“We don’t reenact sculptures, we invoke them. We don’t reproduce history, we create it together with the audience.”
— Magda Fejdasz
P.P.: So what do audiences feel or question as they watch your bodies transform into these living statues of solidarity, resistance, and legacy?
W.P.: Audience members often tell us something stays with them: a fragment of touch, a glance, the rhythm of “ha ha ha”. Some remember the names of the sculptresses; others speak of the tension they felt, physical and emotional, while witnessing female presence and relation.
We don’t reenact sculptures, we invoke them. We don’t reproduce history, we create it together with the audience. For some, it’s a moment of realisation that care can be a force, that togetherness doesn’t erase individuality. For others, it raises questions about the invisibility of women’s labour and what disappears from official narratives. We don’t aim for a single interpretation. We offer the body, movement, and tension, and leave the rest open. It is more like a sculpture where you can view it from every side.
P.P.: Speaking of female presence – the notion of female solidarity feels central. In your view, what does that solidarity look like today, especially in the contemporary arts world?
M.F.: Solidarity, for us, is not a destination but a daily practice. In our work, we try to build conditions for collaboration grounded in dialogue, mutual care, and attention. We’re under no illusion that it’s easy. But we believe that through sustained, embodied effort through sisterhood practice, we can approach more grounded, collective forms of working. Maybe not instant solidarity, but gestures that move us in its direction. This is how we imagine reshaping art, institutions, and what lies beyond – to attune ourselves to the knowledge that comes from the body, and to practice sisterhood.
The Sculptresses
June 5 & 7, 2025
Polish Institute in Paris: 86 rue de la Faisanderie, 75016 Paris
On June 5, 2025, preceding the June 7 performance, the Polish Institute in Paris will host the public debate The Sculptresses. Corps. Objet. Médiation. The event will explore choreography as a medium that activates museum space and, through embodied action, offers a form of care for memory, particularly the artistic legacy of women. The discussion will bring together voices from both curatorial and choreographic fields, including Dr. Ewa Ziembińska, Chief Curator of the Sans corset exhibition and a collaborator on The Sculptresses, and Eva Klimáčková, a Paris-based choreographer and project partner whose work has long connected artistic communities in France and Poland.
Also joining the conversation will be Cécile Bertran, Chief Curator at the Musée Camille Claudel; along with representatives of the Musée Bourdelle – Director Ophélie Ferlier Bouat and Head of Public Engagement Sybil Meunier, which will host an exhibition of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz this autumn. Framed by questions that echo the ethos of activist collectives such as the Guerrilla Girls, the debate reflects a growing commitment among cultural institutions to address historical imbalances and centre the work of women artists, not only through display, but through embodied, performative acts of remembrance.Rather than merely accompanying the performance, this debate forms part of a broader inquiry into how dance and curatorial practice together can activate new, more inclusive ways of engaging with cultural heritage. As The Sculptresses continues to evolve across contexts, it invites institutions and audiences alike to reconsider how we remember, whom we honour, and what forms that remembrance can take. This gathering in Paris marks not just a moment of reflection but a gesture toward a more embodied, equitable future for art and memory.
Performers: Dana Chmielewska, Magda Fejdasz
Choreography: Weronika Pelczyńska, Magda Fejdasz
Production: National Museum in Warsaw
Realization: Marta Szymańska, Karolina Wróblewska-Leśniakk
Music: Natan Kryszk
Sound Recording: Aleksander Żurowski
Costumes: Monika Nyckowska, Agnieszka Orlińska
Dramaturgical consultation: Alicja Czyczel, Aleks Borys
In Collaboration With: Centrum w Ruchu (centrumw_ruchu) Premiere Date: July 11, 2023
Coordination of the Paris presentation: Natalia Barbarska, Karolina Wróblewska-Leśniak, Małgorzata Głuchowska
The work was created at the invitation of the National Museum in Warsaw, as an accompanying event to the exhibition Without a Corset: Camille Claudel and 19th-Century Polish Women Sculptors (exhibition curator: Ewa Ziembińska; curatorial collaboration: Alicja Gzowska).
„Rzeźbiary – kierunek Paryż” is subsidised by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Republic of Poland as part of the programme Inspiring Culture 2025-2026.
