Meanings that transcend language. Profiles of international artists addressing mental health through their work.

Traumatic events necessitate a narrative that aids in their social processing, as emphasised by Mieke Bal, a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and scholar. In the current intricate socio-political landscape, art can serve as a crucial tool for processing healing and promoting communication, effectively dismantling the barriers of verbal expression. Consequently, personal experiences can be expressed through increasingly transmedial artistic forms, allowing creativity to transcend language. 

Each image carries a wealth of visual references that awaken in our imagination, making the act of remembering reliant on political and cultural solidarity to acknowledge the challenging circumstances faced by those who have experienced trauma. In contemporary art, the approach of incorporating often ambiguous quotes from everyday life within artworks plays a crucial role in collectively processing experiences of discrimination. It is essential to recognise artistic practices that establish safe spaces, empowering artists to enrich dominant narratives with various spectrums of social functioning and diverse sensibilities. Art that explores difficult themes establishes a direct connection with audiences, encouraging personal engagement, broadening the audience’s perspective, and allowing authentic personal experiences to acquire a deeper social significance.

Drawing on strategies from activist practices, artists often utilise creative work to document political events, frequently incorporating interviews with socially marginalised communities. The courageous affirmation of one’s rights through visibility and advocacy, alongside the symbolism of camouflage in, for instance, queer identity and the disruption of existing infrastructures rooted in cultural constructs, acts as a powerful rallying cry for unity. Engaging in creative actions can help individuals process trauma, whether through manual, journalistic, reporting, or curatorial efforts. While by working to diminish the stigma surrounding mental health issues, such creative endeavours serve as a means of mediation, bridging divides between conflicting groups and facilitating dialogue free from embarrassment.

Kaja Kann

Kaja Kann, an internationally acclaimed Estonian artist, is renowned for her direct and raw visual language, where body and movement serve as crucial tools to unlock the dynamic potential within static forms. Her performances are characterised by imaginary and timeless arrangements, often resembling a carnival. They frequently incorporate elements of extreme sports, as well as the intersections of music, dance, and even text. In her 2023 work “Mäss” (“Rebellion”), the artist, along with other performers, utilised ropes to execute their acrobatics and employed aerial fabrics. This endeavour demanded considerable effort and preparation from their already fatigued and exposed bodies. This fusion of performance and static imagery produced a vibrant mix, forging connections between the artists and the materials they employ. These explorations challenge the notion of whether such qualities can be discovered in environmental fragments, especially when seen through the lens of an outsider. 

In her 2017 work “Ups and Downs”, Kann emphasised that the creative process itself is her main focus. Her project commenced with the crafting of tapestries born from intense emotions like anger, fear, and excitement – all captured on video. Throughout this process, she undertook a thorough investigation into the phenomena occurring at the material level, specifically focusing on soap and the body, fully dedicating herself to this endeavour. The state of activity appears to exist at the threshold between sleep and wakefulness. Kann delves into the spaces generated by exploring both their dynamic and performative potential, nurturing a rich spatial imagination.

---

Izabela Chamczyk

Izabela Chamczyk creates processual art that combines painting, body movement, video and the materiality of paint. In her oeuvre, she highlights spatial and tactile qualities that engage the audience’s senses, frequently through direct performative actions. Various explosive tones and colour shades express different moods and emotions, enabling the artist to captivate the audience and evoke powerful responses. The artist extracts the meaning of colour in her creations, considering it the main vehicle to convey her messages. In her performative painting, various hues, techniques, and media converge, allowing Chamczyk to redefine the limits of the canvas. 

In the “TOXIC” project from 2022, Izabela Chamczyk showcased organic objects on canvas, that delved into their performative dimension, highlighting the dynamic potential corporeality of paints. The imagery produced in this performative process transcends the confines of the canvas, eliciting direct reactions from viewers. In her studio-laboratory, the artist documents the creation of these paintings through photography and video, telling the story of their physiology. The “TOXIC” project references the chemical vapours from her painting materials while powerfully conveying the emotional states experienced during their creation.

Additionally, Chamczyk plays an educational role in cultural institutions, advocating for accessibility in art. According to the artist, the mental states experienced during performances are deeply intertwined with our bodily conditions, leaving a lasting mark on them. Through her artistic endeavours, which include also organising numerous workshops and initiatives in art education, she aims to extend her influence beyond the gallery and into the broader world.

---

Katarzyna Kozyra

Over the years, Katarzyna Kozyra has consistently undermined prevailing stereotypes and critically reviewed socio-political discourses in her oeuvre. In her artistic practice, Kozyra challenges cultural constructs and behaviour stereotypes rooted in everyday life, and her intricate work has frequently sparked public socio-political debates in the past. Back in 1996, she presented to the public her performative project “Olympia”, in which she used carefully staged photography and a video installation to share her experience of chemotherapy treatment when struggling with cancer since 1992. Just as Manet’s “Olympia”, which is already a canonical representation in the history of art, caused a scandal among contemporary viewers with the way it presented a female nude devoid of mythological camouflage, Kozyra’s “Olympia” does not fit into the convention of presenting the female body. 

The artist, unlike Manet’s original, is not a woman manifesting her sexuality through her naked body, but a fully embodied oncology patient, and like her prototype, she questions the aesthetic habits of common art consumers. In this case, Kozyra performs a revolution by provocatively presenting different stages of breast cancer in order to overthrow the patriarchal concept of an idealised female form. The author envisioned “Olympia” as an effort to reclaim dignity for a decaying, sick body, while simultaneously engaging in a critique of the widely endorsed, official portrayal of a beautiful, vibrant, and healthy physique. It evolved into a form of protest against the canon of female corporeality, which is often overlooked in traditional artistic discourse. As Kozyra herself noted, the purpose of her work was to demonstrate that a sick body possesses the same dignity and normalcy as a healthy one, particularly due to its visible fragility.

---

Aneta Grzeszykowska

Aneta Grzeszykowska immerses herself in intimate spaces, examining themes of mental health and self-awareness through the fragmented corporeality evident in her video and photographic projects. For Grzeszykowska, art serves as a means to navigate complex emotions and social expectations. By manipulating her own body image, she confronts social norms regarding identity and its visual representation. The central theme of her research is the mystery surrounding identity, expressed through the dialectics of presence and absence, invisibility and disappearance. Through the presence of sculptural forms in which she recreates body parts in wax, a sense of denial or fragmentation of the self emerges, activating the symbolic charge of what is not clearly visible but remains imprinted in the memory. 

In her oeuvre, action or gesture, the anatomical parts photographed question the gap between natural and artificial, playing with visual perception to explore a universal but elusive dimension. The artist participated in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, where she exhibited a series entitled Mama (2018). In this work, Grzeszykowska explored and questioned the social constraints placed on bodies, social roles, and expectations, depicting her daughter interacting with a silicone doll that bears an uncanny resemblance to the artist herself. In this way, Grzeszykowska presented motherhood as a study of self-alienation.

---

Kinga Burek  

Kinga Burek draws inspiration for her expressive painting from perceiving the details of everyday life, placing them in a larger social context where the personal and the political overlap. Her paintings depict informal intimate moments of everyday situations, often revealing social tensions and the invisible, fluid boundaries of social injustice and systemic violence that creep beneath the surface. In her works, fears and traumas come alive in tangible figurative forms – sometimes distorted, brutal, or bloody, dripping with red paint and torn from their original context to take centre stage. The representation of the body in her paintings transcends language barriers, communicating through strongly defined and expressive figurative styles that make extensive use of illustrative techniques. By employing a simplified figuration, Burek aims to directly broaden the audience of her art. She achieves this by using a vibrant and intensely saturated colour palette, designed to astonish viewers with its expressiveness and to directly engage their emotions. 

Her work is both sensitive and rebellious, revealing a vital and creative energy, a potential rarely attributed to art historically created by women in the past. This form of expression offers the artist the possibility of going beyond stereotypical social roles. Burek aims for her works to embody the scream, symbolising temperament and a powerful act of resistance to violence, mediated by her dynamic and fast-paced painting style. The artist consciously shares her vital energy with the audience, bringing cultural codes to life on the canvas.

---

Karolina Balcer

Karolina Balcer is a transmedia artist actively engaged in the creation of performative objects and installations in public spaces, using architecture as a means to organise and enhance social life. In her work, she frequently explores the infrastructures that foster a sense of privacy and security, focusing on elements such as visual and symbolic representation, interpersonal relationships, and shelter. Her projects often involve the active participation of family members, drawing from her personal experiences and adopting an educational format. 

Between 2020 and 2024, she focused on a family project addressing mental health issues, which culminated in a series of exhibitions accompanied by an educational programme and the publication titled “Happy Family – A Guide to Mental Health”, released by Krupa Gallery and Bęc Zmiana. The inspiration for this project came from her own experience of her brother experiencing periods of homelessness. Through her work, Balcer shares an authentic narrative that seeks to dismantle the stigma surrounding mental health. In this narrative, her brother’s experiences take on a social dimension, resonating with a wider audience. 

The themes she explores often inform the choice of media in her recent work, which includes tufting (a rug-making technique) and various textile methods. Her series of tapestries, perceived as sculptural forms, draws inspiration from the common saying “sweeping problems under the carpet” – a coping strategy and at the same time harmful mental practice that can worsen issues. Her paintings and tufted objects, along with textual elements, reference everyday items associated with domestic spaces. Balcer’s goal is to cultivate a welcoming environment that fosters conversations about challenging subjects.

---

Anastasia Rydlevskaya 

Anastasia Rydlevskaya is a Belarusian artist with a background in philosophy and philology, who transcends binary perspectives through diverse media at the crossroads of painting and transmedia installations. She explores themes such as mental instability and non-binary identification, intertwined with philosophical reflections, pagan mythology, traumatic experiences, and personal battles against oppressive systems. The artist draws largely from her own experiences of the repression of the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in her homeland. Her oeuvre is marked by subtle, multi-layered metaphors and narratives that serve as a strategic form of resistance against dominant narratives and the pervasive atmosphere of fear. 

Rydlevskaya’s surreal and often ambiguous paintings feature various animals, chimaeras, and flowers, each with one open eye, symbolising the empathy of a conscious observer who refuses to look away. In addition to her synthetic paintings and drawings, Rydlevskaya creates theatrical masks that are integral to her practice. These masks act as a metaphor for the faceless, repressive political system and its many victims. They function as expansive tools of expression, designed to evoke strong emotions and uncover hidden truths, offering more experimental possibilities than traditional two-dimensional media. Utilising a range of artistic media – including graphics, installation, text, music, photography, and video – Rydlevskaya crafts a cohesive artistic universe that transcends binary perspectives.

---

Martyna Pinkowska

The sense of uncertainty forms the cornerstone of Martyna Pinkowska‘s artworks, where fantasy and reality intertwine, placing blurred and deformed body silhouettes at the forefront. Her paintings depict anonymous smudged and fragmented naked figures, often faceless or wearing S&M masks, alongside portrayals of the artist herself. While the canvases are infused with warm tones, the figures are set against an ambiguous, infinite backdrop reminiscent of a landscape after a catastrophe. For Pinkowska, painting serves primarily as a means to express and process intense experiences that elude verbal articulation, underscoring its deeply intimate essence. Each piece and figure she crafts on canvas emerges from personal motivations, stemming from a desire for self-analysis and the need to navigate specific emotional states and experiences. 

In her work, the artist delves into personal frustrations and sorrows, revealing the mental, psychological, and physical states of women facing the challenges of contemporary life. By examining the dynamics of expectations and models of femininity, Pinkowska, similar to Grzeszykowska, processes the connections between interpersonal relationships and offers a safe refuge from responsibility and guilt through her paintings. In her own experiences and those of women close to her, she identifies recurring themes, recognising universal fears, concerns, and desires.

---

Anton Shebetko 

Through his extensive travel documentation across Europe, Anton Shebetko captures the difficult experiences of displaced queer communities. In his oeuvre, the artist delves into the significant issues faced by socially excluded groups and the LGBTQ+ community in Ukraine, exploring topics such as memory, loss of identity, multiple histories, and the crucial role that photography and archival materials play in telling these narratives. Even from afar, he disseminates knowledge, shedding light on the often-overlooked history of queer Ukraine, and underlining the existence of this community embedded in a predominantly homophobic and conservative environment. His extensive research centres on projects that involve installations and interventions connected to the historical hubs of underground queer activity in Crimea, alongside contemporary issues such as the experiences of Ukrainian LGBTQ+ soldiers. 

The “Pride Camouflage Flag” presents a fresh interpretation of the “Progress Pride Flag”, where the intricate symbolism of a camouflaged queer identity arises from a blend of conflicting concepts. The flag’s vibrant pattern serves as a powerful call for unity and underscores the pressing need to assert rights through visibility and advocacy. This flag is inspired by the presence of queer individuals within the Ukrainian army, who not only combat Russian aggression but also advocate for equal rights in Ukraine. In the artistic piece “Heelzz on Wheelzz” from 2024, the artist gathers phrases from everyday life and arranges them in a dialogue, as if inviting us to join them at the table or presenting them “served” on plates. Through this gesture, he amplifies the voices of various marginalised groups, including taxi drivers, drag artists, and queer communities.