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Katarzyna Kujawska-Murphy’s main field of artistic research is space and time in the context of the psychophysiology of perception. This is visualised in her spatial installations. The artist also explores the social aspects of human existence in the psychology of the city. Her drawing activities, installations and films are characterised by the aesthetics of modernism and constructivism and video art of the 1960s and 1970s.

In a sketch accompanying the exhibition project, Katarzyna Kujawska-Murphy writes: “Visual communication construed as a critical mental shortcut identifies moral values based on human dependence on reality, space and time. In my efforts to understand or feel it, in a multi-element exposition, I intend to analyse it by redefining space into a state of mind. I pay special attention to time, when it is necessary to perform simultaneously several different physical and mental actions, which results in various statements on the feeling of entropy and transience. The exhibition “5:15 pm” implies presence and absence at the same time, and the viewer makes another, personal understanding of the message. At exactly 5:15 pm, several, often contradictory, mental and physical decisions are made simultaneously in human perception. Also around this hour, the daily changes of brain chemistry occur. It is a liminal moment – caesura: one does not know whether it is the dividing line between better and worse or between worse and better. The exhibition visualises the shifts of order in people’s everyday lives. The installations oscillate around the tension of objects subjected to physics, gravity and the psychophysiology of vision. Desire for the absent is a strongly motivating stimulus.”

Katarzyna Kujawska-Murphy is a graduate of two art schools: Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London and the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań (now the M. Abakanowicz University of Art), where she is head of the 1st Drawing Department and teaches at the Faculty of Painting and Drawing. In 2010 she received a state decoration: “Meritorious for Polish Culture”. She is the winner of the Award of the Minister of Culture and Art (National Painting Review, Promotions’97, Legnica – Best Diploma). She has participated as a speaker in international symposia, among others, at Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she completed a project and exhibition in cooperation with the Kosciuszko Foundation: “Silence in Slow Motion” at Lou Reed Studio in Westbeth. She has exhibited her work in Poland and abroad, mainly in England, Japan, South Korea, Germany (e.g. BAUHAUS School-Dessau), Italy, USA, Ukraine, Taiwan. She is the curator of international exhibitions, including Regeneration of Forgotten Quarters of Poznań, art festivals in collaboration with centres in London, Berlin, and Osaka. For 20 years, she has been promoting Polish contemporary art abroad, mainly in Japan.

Photos / Krzysztof Tomasik