The body is the phenomenon, which on one hand is subjected to the language and description, but on the other hand it resists of forms of articulation, and it is immune to the words.
In my work I consider the twin factors of the body and the text to be equal: the body of the text means the body as a map, a book or other narrative (an individual or a mass which Dubravka Ugrešić refers to as bodygraphy), as well as the text of the body – writing which takes on the form of bodily features, being both material and subjective.

My practice addresses urgent questions such as, ‘Can the body be translated into language?’, ‘Can the body be independent of culture?’,  ‘Can art be a medium for the translation of representations of corporeality in different cultures and can it challenge stereotypes by individualising the body image?’

During my research I would like to engage in a broad discourse on physicality understood as a processual narration and one which in humanities appears both as a central problem in social studies, but also as the vanguard of contemporary humanities (experience of the pain, the body sick). The contemporary body functions in the category of synecdoche of a social system with its concessions on normativeness, because the condition of the body as a healthy organism is an indicator of what is acceptable and what is socially marginalised. Hence, during my research I am focused on the individual corporeal experience analysed often against a broad contemporary historical and social background: illness, crisis, identity, migration, post-dependency trauma, the marginalisation by linguistic barriers, ethnicity, gender discrimination and isolation.

In wider perspective I intend to search for answers to questions about the driving forces and processes which have influenced complex ideas of identity of language and the role of the body, its signs and senses in contemporary cultural communication.

My research is interdisciplinary in nature (language, corporeality, psychology, medicine and anthropology) and is informed by the media and methods which I develop in my art: documentation practice, performance, video, animation, installation, texts, textual objects, hypertext-stories, painting and drawing, diary writing, interviews, records.

Website: http://dawidek.art.pl/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/87604604

Supervisors

Primary supervisor: Melanie Counsell, Hayley Newman
Secondary supervisors: Sharon Morris