What happens when the body becomes not a subject, but a medium? Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s work unfolds through gesture, repetition, and resistance, giving form to emotions and experiences that elude everyday language. Beginning as a video artist, she used her body as a site of negotiation between self and surroundings, testing its limits. She later developed a unique practice of creating paintings that continued to involve the body and its dynamics, translating it into a laborious, tactile process of making.
Best known for her relief-like works made with pins, Tyszkiewicz employed a much wider range of materials, often drawn from everyday life. The exhibition Stories That Tell Themselves at Profile Foundation, curated by Bożena Czubak, brings together a selection of works that foreground Tyszkiewicz’s process-driven approach and highlight the diversity of the matter she used in her practice. Through pins, nails, metal plates, ropes, and fabrics, works emerge that resist passive viewing, instead inviting a sensory and affective engagement.
Writing Through the Body
Born in 1953, Teresa Tyszkiewicz began her artistic career in the late 1970s alongside Polish neo-avantgarde filmmakers. Yet, from the very beginning, she rejected the movement’s characteristic conceptual and analytical tendencies. The films and performances she presented at the time focused on the body and sensuality. They were highly expressive and explored the realm of emotions, intuition, imagination, and unconscious desires.
Her own body, often naked, was in the centre of these works. She described it as a “connector between reality and imagination.” Immersing herself in various types of organic materials of differing qualities – sometimes coarse or dirty, sometimes soft and sensual – she tested its limits. Like in the 1980 film Grain, where we can see Tyszkiewicz submerge in the titular grains, rub against dirty vegetables, or be covered in feathers.
She documents the confrontation between the individual and external reality, negotiating the boundaries between herself and the outside world.
These early performative works reveal her need to connect with the raw matter and experience it physically. She documents the confrontation between the individual and external reality, negotiating the boundaries between herself and the outside world. The artist becomes a part of the surroundings, seemingly losing her own identity within it. This tension between the female body and the outside sparked numerous feminist readings of her practice.
As the curator of the exhibition at the Profile Foundation (and the artist’s long-time friend) emphasises, Tyszkiewicz employed her femininity in a very conscious way. Although she never explicitly identified her practice as feminist, it is difficult not to see it that way. It is particularly interesting when viewed through Hélène Cixous’s 1975 book, The Laugh of the Medusa, where the author introduced the concept of écriture feminine – women’s writing.
Cixous explored the idea of a form of writing rooted in the body, fluidity, multiplicity, and the expression of female experience beyond the rational, linear discourse identified with patriarchy. In this sense, Tyszkiewicz’s work serves as a visual exemplification of this theory, expressed not through words but through the body itself – especially when juxtaposed with the works of the neo-avantgarde of the period.
In 1982, Tyszkiewicz, along with her husband, the artist Zdzisław Sosnowski, moved to Paris. She vanished entirely from the Polish art scene for several years, during which she established the artistic language for which she is now best known – paintings created with pins. Even though she moved away from film and performance, processuality still constituted the basis of her artistic practice. The act of piercing the canvas with pins was a physical one, requiring strength and patience, taking on the character of a trance-like ritual. The largest of her works utilised as many as 20-30,000 pins. It also had an element of brutality in it, as the canvas was mostly covered with paper and a thick layer of paint, which created resistance to the process.
Yet, there were more than just pins in her unique repertoire. Her extensive body of work includes materials such as strings and ropes, metal plates, wires, nails, and clothing. Many of these materials were everyday found objects, as best seen in the 1987 piece French Post, created with a mailing bag still bearing printed words that reference its previous use. The exhibition at the Profile Foundation features pieces that reflect this diversity of materials, highlighting the remarkable expressiveness of Tyszkiewicz’s practice. Her process of creation is not what we usually consider artistic. Besides piercing, Tyszkiewicz bent, wrapped, cut, or soldered. Her works grew organically, swelling with matter, creating shapes that emerge from the surface.
The title of the exhibition, Stories That Tell Themselves, reflects the intrinsic quality of Tyszkiewicz’s works. They are not narrative, and they don’t imitate the external world. Nor do they offer stable points of reference for interpretation. As the curator emphasises, meaning emerges instead through the tension of materials – their weight, texture, or friction – registering both emotional intensity and the physical struggle of creation. This way, the interpretation unfolds in the encounter between the artwork and the viewer, engaging all their senses, as the works demand an active form of perception that extends beyond the visual. We can almost sense the sharpness of the pins or wires, the rough texture of the ropes and cloths, and the cold, firm feel of the metal plates. The physical, embodied process of creation is thus mirrored in the viewer’s experience.
Her process of creation is not what we usually consider artistic. Besides piercing, Tyszkiewicz bent, wrapped, cut, or soldered. Her works grew organically, swelling with matter, creating shapes that emerge from the surface.
Inside/Outside: Flesh and Memory
Many of Tyszkiewicz’s works evoke flesh. Not only as a result of their intensely physical mode of production, but also through forms that suggest bodily fragments, membranes, or internal organs. In Aseret Hole (1983), presented in the exhibition, several tube-like forms that strongly resemble the shape of an intestine protrude from the red background. The association with blood comes to mind, not only from the colour itself, but also from the way the paint appears to be dripping at the lower edge. To the right, a black surface is partially enclosed by three wooden slats. Are they protecting the opening from the outside world, or are they trying to contain it, prevent it from expanding?
Intimate and at times traumatic experiences form the basis of her practice. The Aseret series suggests a personal dimension through the title itself, it being the artist’s name spelled backwards. The works represent a reverse image of her personal life; a kind of negative that brings to the surface what remains hidden. In Aseret Hole, the black surface may reference a traumatic event, a black hole that swallows all. The artist is trying to restrict it, protecting her body from further harm, already wounded by intense emotions.
Vaginal forms are also a distinctive feature of Tyszkiewicz’s work. In the exhibition, they appear in another piece from the Aseret series – Aseret Black (1983). They seem to burst through the surface of the work, as if they have torn it apart. Red, uneven, and scraped, they bear a sense of violence that evokes both pain and repulsion. These unsettling bodily forms confront the viewer with what is usually repressed or expelled, in this case, female sexuality that exceeds and destabilises the normative, highly eroticised image constructed for the male gaze. Their disruptive ambivalence can be understood through Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject – something familiar yet marginalised that disturbs identity and order by collapsing the boundary between inside and outside. In this sense, her work stands out as remarkably progressive for its time, confronting deeply ingrained taboos around female physiology that, even today, remain far from fully dismantled.
Bożena Czubak highlights another recurring motif in Tyszkiewicz’s work – a cocoon. As a symbol of metamorphosis and renewal, it appears throughout her practice, beginning with early films in which the artist emerges from cocoon-like structures, transformed. In the exhibition, this motif takes on a more totemic form: tightly wrapped constructions that enclose and protect their contents.
Memory 100, created between 2004 and 2009, consists of a series of fabric spheres of varying sizes, bound with string. Encased within them are fragments of old canvases and pieces of clothing, forming a kind of time capsule that preserves traces of the artist’s past. Made from everyday materials once present in her daily life, the work carries a distinctly personal charge. Some of the forms are punctured with pins, introducing a note of tension into their otherwise protective structure. We can only guess at the nature of the memories encased within – whether the artist wrapped them to protect or to contain them, reminiscent of the black hole in the Aseret Hole piece.
Throughout her practice, Teresa Tyszkiewicz drew inspiration from the ordinary, everyday life and skillfully articulated the complexity of female experience. Her work gives form to the ambiguity of the body and its cultural standing. It continues to resonate with many younger artists who find in her practice a compelling model for engaging with complex and often difficult emotions. The exhibition at Profile Foundations demonstrates that there is still much to uncover in the artist’s distinctive practice.
Throughout her practice, Teresa Tyszkiewicz drew inspiration from the ordinary, everyday life and skillfully articulated the complexity of female experience. Her work gives form to the ambiguity of the body and its cultural standing.
The exhibition Teresa Tyszkiewicz. Stories That Tell Themselves is on view at Profile Foundation in Warsaw until 13 June 2026.
