Dorota Nieznalska

Dorota Nieznalska (b. 1973 in Gdańsk) is a visual artist and sculptor, a graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts, counted among the leading representatives of Polish critical art. She creates installations, sculptural objects, video and photographs, in which she subjects social norms to critical analysis - especially the constructions of masculinity, the cult of physical strength and the macho - and also controversially reaches for Christian iconography and Catholic symbolism.

Her most notorious work, the installation „Passion” (2001, Wyspa Gallery in Gdańsk) - combining a steel cross with an image of male genitalia and a looped film of the face of a man exercising at a gym - became the subject of a years-long trial for the offence of religious feelings. The case grew to the rank of a symbol of the debate on the limits of creative freedom and on the relationships of art, politics and the media: after a guilty verdict in 2003 and a retrial, the artist was finally acquitted in Gdańsk in 2010.

In the following years Nieznalska turned towards the themes of historical memory and the heritage of the former East Prussia, realising among other things a project devoted to the Tannenberg-Denkmal monument. Her works have been shown at solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad (Sweden, Germany), as well as in institutions such as MOCAK in Kraków. Nieznalska's work remains one of the most important voices of Polish engaged art.