An artist, curator, theorist, and academic – Maciej Zdanowicz’s practice unfolds at the intersections of image, sound, text, and physical substance. With a particular focus on border spaces, his work probes zones of instability – sites where political, material, and perceptual boundaries blur and renegotiate their terms. Working extensively across Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Zdanowicz approaches art as a mode of presence within fragile contexts. His curatorial and artistic engagements suggest that art can operate as shelter, testimony, and encounter. Borderlands, both geographic and psychological, become generative zones. Fragility of materials, bodies, memory, and context permeates the work. The aesthetic is distinctly embodied. Works are sensed as much as seen.
Across many of his projects, Zdanowicz turns toward matter that absorbs, acts, cracks, and resonates. Allowing materials to dissolve or fracture, he resists the cultural demand for polish and permanence. Duration becomes the operative condition. Time and material enter into reciprocal exchange, each registering the pressures of the other. Works function as living registers: they generate thought, sensation, and presence while remaining marked by transformation. Change is not incidental but structural.
Responsive Matter
Tabula Salina (2025) is a compelling point at which to encounter the artist’s practice. An immersive body of work in which salt becomes an active agent, reacting to moisture, temperature, gravity, and time. Material, environment, and temporality begin to act as co-authors of the work. The project frames salt not as a static substance but as a responsive medium that registers the conditions around it. Surfaces alter slowly; crystalline formations emerge and recede. Salt carries a dense cultural history: it preserves bodies and food, marks landscapes, and mediates survival. In Zdanowicz’s hands, salt becomes a paradoxical recorder, preserving through transformation rather than stasis. Rather than fixing a moment in time, the salt records change itself, turning instability into a form of memory. The piece becomes less an object than a living interface, shaped by both natural conditions and contextual memory. At Święty Krzyż Monastery, a former prison cell, the installation absorbed humidity, architecture, and silence alike, turning space into a participant in the work.
A related sensibility emerges in Reading the Cracks, developed during a residency at the Yiddish Cultural Center. Reliefs made from raw chamotte clay are deliberately left unfired, allowing them to dry, fissure, and gradually disintegrate. Cracking surfaces mirror emotional and social precarity. Fragments of personal correspondence and literary traces accompany the works, situating fragile material within a wider reflection on identity, memory, and normative pressure. Similarly, The Voice That Did Not Survive, hundreds of ceramic tablets – many broken – bear relief imprints of statements from Dnipro residents about the city’s industrial past, Soviet colonisation, and the present experience of war. This fragile archive speaks precisely through its impermanence, raising urgent questions.
Empathy is a thread that runs profoundly through Zdanowicz’s work. The broken, tactile surfaces compel us to sense instability, fragility, and the weight of memory. Rather than allowing passive observation, Zdanowicz asks us to inhabit discomfort, confronting both the impossibility and the necessity of bearing memory. Salt, clay, and organic processes foreground becoming and erasure, turning change itself into the work’s subject. These pieces do not present a finished form; they ask the viewer to witness transformation as it unfolds, making fragility and impermanence tangible.
Trace, Absence, and the Real
Zdanowicz is fascinated by the “trace” – an imprint, a negative of something that once existed – and by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic thought. Many of his works stage absence materially, giving form to what Lacan calls the Real: that dimension of experience which resists symbolization and escapes stable meaning. His investigation of the trace extends beyond mineral processes into geopolitical terrain. In projects such as A War That Doesn’t Exist (2025), the title gestures toward invisibility – toward conflicts denied, silenced, or psychically displaced. War persists not only in explosions but in absences, social amnesia, and narratives that refuse acknowledgement.
He constructs experience where sound and image converge in continuous loops, producing an intrusive presence that paradoxically empties conflict of its literal meaning. Rather than reconstructing historical facts, the works employ glitch-based recordings and mass-media imagery from the war in Ukraine to explore disintegration and multiplicity. Images disperse, their structures destabilised, resisting coherent representation. Digital pixels – blurred, suspended – function like grains of truth, hovering between existence and disappearance. A recurring motif of salt appears scattered around the central piece, the swing: a paradoxical object that is both inviting and withholding, evoking a body suspended in tension. The sonic and visual loops operate as affective devices, saturating the viewer with a sense of anxiety, displacement, and mediated trauma. Zdanowicz enacts the emotional resonance of the war, translating it into an affective, almost physical experience. The work confronts the spectator with the impossibility of comprehension, making the affect of conflict, the unease, the psychic friction, tangible and elusive.
Zdanowicz brings the body into dialogue with the visual field. His installations do not simply present images; they stage situations that the viewer physically senses – through balance, gravity, or the implied presence of a body that cannot fully act. There is a deep empathy embedded in the method itself: viewers are compelled to inhabit discomfort, to feel tension, absence, and instability. Emotional and corporeal experience becomes inseparable from the visual, so that unease is carried rather than merely witnessed.
Similarly, in Playground (2025), fragility emerges through the tension between invitation and instability. By turning play into a site of rehearsal, vulnerability, and negotiation, Zdanowicz highlights the precariousness of social and bodily interaction. The structures are contingent on participant engagement, and meaning depends on movement, attention, and context. Fragility is both physical and social: the body is exposed, rules are tested, and the city’s presence is felt through relational rather than visual cues. The work underscores how interaction, memory, and perception are delicate processes, always in flux and never fully secure.
Memory as Fragile Archive
Ukraine has become a sustained focus of Zdanowicz’s recent work. Through sound, image, and spatial intervention, he examines how presence, trauma, and memory circulate within environments shaped by war. This fragile archive exists through vulnerability: salt crystallises fragments of everyday life extracted from ruins, producing a record that remains provisional and unstable. Edges of Memory (2025), realised in Dnipro, unfolds as a layered meditation on lived experience in a region shaped by ongoing war. Combining video, sound, objects, and photographic registers, the project navigates the imagined, the symbolic, and the real. Memory emerges as a fractured topology rather than linear recollection. Zdanowicz constructs material and sensory translations of lived tension. Political geography becomes embodied perception. Across his practice, Zdanowicz interrogates systems of power – propaganda, biopolitical control, and bodies disciplined by ideology. Structures of absence, gaps, erasures, and suspended presences form a quiet but persistent mode of resistance. Fragility of contexts, materials, and human threads through the work.
What he creates is shaped not only by his own experiences but also by the stories that begin to co-create him, becoming part of his artistic practice itself. Unheld Encounters (2025) embodies this dynamic: a poetic video essay following train journeys to Dnipro, capturing faces reflected in windows and conversations that may have happened – or may not. In this work, absence, unrealised connections, and emotions stored only in memory are not just subject matter – they are the very material of the practice, illustrating how lived experience and encountered narratives merge to shape both process and perception.
Acoustic Traces
In much of his work, fragility emerges not only through material choice but through the translation of the ephemeral into the tangible. Beginning with phenomena like sound vibrations, acoustic spectra, or city soundscapes, he transforms these experiences into visual or sculptural forms. Projects such as Pejzaż akustyczny, realised in Łódź, Sofia, Istanbul, or derived from the Black Sea, treat sound as a material that informs graphic works. By making vibrations visible, Zdanowicz exposes the delicate threshold between perception and form: experience can be seen yet remains partial, unstable, fleeting.
In an age saturated with images and instantaneous documentation, Zdanowicz proposes another model of record. He archives through erosion rather than accumulation, inviting embodied witnesses. The viewer lingers, noticing subtle shifts while accepting that total recollection is impossible. Through this refusal of closure, Zdanowicz pushes against simplified narratives of trauma and history. Material vulnerability becomes witness. The crack becomes testimony. Dissolution becomes form. Fragility is not a limitation here – it is the very condition of perception, memory, and empathy.
