Friday, October 17, 18:30–20:00
Location: VBKÖ Archive (Maysedergasse 2/28, 4th floor)
Join us next week for a public talk with Adrianna Wiktoria Kowalik, head curator and coordinator of the Secondary Archive at the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation. The event will present a selection of Central and Eastern European women artists whose work directly engages with the theme of invisibility — many of whom use their artistic practices as tools for recording and preserving memory in the absence of formal historical recognition.
Secondary Archive is a digital platform committed to amplifying the silenced and marginalized voices of women artists from Central and Eastern Europe and post-socialist contexts. It fosters urgent dialogues on gender, memory, and activism, carving out vital spaces where these voices are preserved as acts of resistance. The platform confronts systemic erasure and exclusion from public discourse — a silencing intensified by war, political authoritarianism, social conservatism, and economic precarity.
Adrianna Wiktoria Kowalik is the head curator and coordinator of the Secondary Archive at the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation. Her research focuses on critical art from Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. She holds a master’s degree in Contemporary Art from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and continues her academic and curatorial work through the Secondary Archive. Recently, she presented at the Resilience Through Culture conference in Brussels, introducing the project Secondary Archive: Women Artists in War, which documents the work of Ukrainian women artists creating directly from the war front.