July 10, 2025, 10 am – 2 pm
Many thanks to the artist & writer Dagmara Genda for her lecture Fugitive Lines and Accidental Drawings and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School, Arts Incubator, and Live Online Courses & Classes.
“A quote by Witold Gombrowicz, a fellow Pole and an interwar absurdist writer, is the inspiration behind my long-running methodology of cutting and recombining sources in ever-changing ways. In his last book Cosmos (1965) he asks how many ways the 24 letters of the alphabet can be rearranged as an analogy for the universe’s contingency of meaning. This question is embodied by his characters whose narrative is led by arbitrary connections such as the discovery of an arrow shape embedded in the texture of a stucco ceiling.
Since 2021 I have been expanding my drawing practice into sculpture by translating drawn lines into at times polished, at other times lacquered steel. By creating reconfigurable sculptural installations, I treat each element as a line or a brush stroke that can be moved around, or spatially collaged, to create a new drawing. Rather than understand the works as drawings in space, they are drawings that, having escaped the safety of their comfort zones, now attempt to make do in space.
Whether something is hanging or hung, is sometimes a matter of perspective, as Gombrowicz’s book, whose story revolves around a series of hangings – a bird, a pencil, a cat and finally a man – proposes. Our realities are shaped by the frames through which we look, and so with my extended drawing practice, I make as many as I can, so that the world can reveal itself in its coming into being, in the moment, in its very contingency.” (Text by courtesy of Dagmara Genda)
Dagmara Genda works as an artist and freelance writer in Berlin. She immigrated to Canada from Poland as a child, and proceeded to move from place to place with her family: Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, London, Toronto, Guelph, with extended sojourns in the US and UK. A corresponding restlessness feeds her practice which tends to focus on the changeability and instability of perception. From the foundation of drawing, her work expands into sculpture, installation and public art. Recent projects include Untitled (For Lutz 1978/2024) for the middle and secondary schools in the Allee der Kosmonauten in Berlin as well the two-part work, [ɡəˈhøːɐ̯], for the district court house in Königs Wusterhausen. She has exhibited at the Walter Phillips Gallery; Banff, Kai 10, Düsseldorf; Esker Foundation, Calgary; for the CAFK+A public art biennial in Kitchener, Canada. She is also interested in extra-institutional contexts, like when she organised an eight-person exhibition, Something Was Coming Upon Us, in a Berlin apartment from which she and all other tenants were evicted due to real estate speculation. Starting October, she will be working for four months at Fonderie Darling in Montreal.
More information on the Dagmara Genda Website.
