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kissing a rock
Un-tower Tryouts
PAIN GAME
how to darn
BREASTMILK
cv
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kissing a rock
Un-tower Tryouts
PAIN GAME
how to darn
BREASTMILK
cv
we’re having a contributions column there. contact via email mariia.lemperk@gmail.com to participate
Germay / Poland / Ukraine / Spain
2023-ongoing
theatrical play
collective / solo practice
performative action / concert
Kissing a Rock is an eco-sexual site-specific performative practice. It's been explored in the places of nature, galleries and theaters, shown on Porn Film festivalsindividually and in a group since 2023.
An intimate date with the nature of vector-changing matter of an archetypical story. A kiss - marked with the attention of romantic focus, kiss as a confession, a stamp, a memorial, a sign of a changing point, may we have a kiss for initiation?
Kollnburg, Germany
Schiesselhaus AiR
Camera and sound: Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoglu
As Kaja J. framed “intentionally dropping” in June of 25’ with a sticky of menstrual blood finger i touched rocks, it dried immediately.
1. 27.05.2023 Bavarian Forest, Kollnburg, Germany.
2. 20.07.2023 Alten Spital, Viechtach, Germany.
3. 29.09.2023 Triennale Grafiki, Kraków, Poland.
4. 24.08.2023 Odesa, Ukraine.
5. 28.09.2023 Rzeka Dłubnia, Kraków, Poland.
6. 02.03.2024 Habibi Kiosk, Munich, Germany.
7. 25.07.2024 Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Kraków, Poland.
8. 08.2024 Kem School, Teatr Cinema, Karkonosze Mountains.
9. 22.08.2024 Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Kraków, Poland.
10 23.11.2024 Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław, Poland.
10. 31.03.2025 SYRO, Kraków, Poland.
11. 14.06.2023 Chelva, Spain.
*Rock tattoo for Kaś, Warsaw, 2024.
*Kiosk Kissing, BREASTMILK, Kraków, 2023.
*Screenings, residencies (2023-2025): Poland: Queerowe Otwarcie, SYRO: window sill , Germany: Sciesslhaus AiR: pillow, Greece: Satyrs and Maenads: the Athens P*rn Film Festival, Netherlands: Porn Film Festival Amsterdam.
editions 7 and 9
Duration: random, from 30 min to 2,5 hours.
Stenography: Pale of rocks, massive floor-weights, 4 pedestals, 10 metal scrubbers, a glass container with water, a white towel, a red lipstick, a desk stand mirror, transparent polish with a brush, 6 walking canes (?).
Action plan:
1 phase: choosing a rock.
The rocks are located in a specific place of the scene, they are laying on the floor.
2 phase: weighing a rock.
After choosing a rock a person is stepping on weights holding a rock.
3 phase: cleaning a rock.
The phase locates itself within a simple pedestal with a glass container full of water, metal scrubbers and a towel on top of it. The pedestal should be huge enough to hold a place for a rock and all of the elements of the cleaning station.
4 phase: kissing a rock.
In the fourth phase the rock is located on another pedestal with a mirror and lipstick. Applying a lipstick and kissing a rock.
5 phase: a clear coat on a rock.
The rock is getting covered with a clear coat of polish (from a big cane or nail polish tubes).
6 phase: displaying a rock.
After applying the clear coat the rock is going on a long pedestal and lining up with the following ones.
After finishing the last step the action repeats as many times as possible. A person is using various walking canes to cross the space from one phase to another. The cane is used as a walking support and a prop for tricks.
The action ends when the alarm rings, the alarm is programmed randomly from 30 minutes to 2,5 hours, the kissing person and a possible public are not informed about the duration.
notes:
You sent me the thoracic vertebrae disc made of sugar. Just wanted to ask should i bite, savour, or let it dissolve?
Cannibalism and allowing yourself to be fed, a sweet pre bite prelude, the taste of consuming your own form. Healing-licking, a ritual of repair — each circle of the tongue softens the sharp edges of the broken, when it starts to come together to the places of origin. Tasting oneself to understand how to fill what’s hollow.
liking holes (a groupe once licked my absence, i felt it from the far)
fingers and food, after surgery genitals, sex.
the slick line of healed flesh.
like a dog, furr and a naked pink spot; reopening wounds/
intimacy; spitting;
rage, aggression, libido, self regulation, joke
sex, intimacy, rage: self-regulation through hunger and satisfaction.
spitting between breaths, a reminder of the warmth pulsing beneath.
Location: Forest, a scattering of pine trees
Scene: A vestibulectomy Mayo stand.
The doctor prescribes a circular motion, a lick’s trajectory over a wound. “To understand the centre, draw around it,” they say. Lick the wound — dirt, compost, the soil’s grit, the juice of rotten raspberries, a loamy pulse on the tongue.
Licking compost - dirt - soil, swallowing a juice of rotten raspberries.
i can’t stop thinking of it while “decomposing” - mayfield brooks talks us through the practice. The feast of flash, ligaments, bones of an enormous body of whale, each day - a hierarchy of death thinking.
A tongue’s sandpaper licks at what’s broken so it reaches cold, blood, and salt, then slides over sand, sweat, and stone. The pot has no handle anymore still holding the echo of past touches and doesens coffee cups.
licking a solid material, licking cold, blood, sand, sweat.
licking a cup with some black coffee.
licking and when swallowing, wow.
a smooth river stone rests on my tongue. i close my mouth, letting its coolness ground me. stones, they say, carry the earth’s ancient thirst, their weight and language. i feel it pressing down. i taste iron, soil, something metallic—like blood but not blood. tongue follows its contours, edges softened by centuries of water, it’s a thirst that can’t be sated, a reminder of hunger that isn’t meant to be filled. i try to swallow this thirst.
29.09.2023
Kraków, Poland
Photo by @eweliinazajac
Hair by @kajajaloza
Camera: Tetiana Mytrofanova
rock gathering with Łukasz Trzciński and Dominik Stanisławski
@schiesslhaus_air, Kollnburg, Germany
location: @altesspital
ph: @contanchi
making out with rocks with @kem.warsaw
08.2024, Teatr Cinema, Karkonosze Mountains.
Poland
2024 - ongoing
screen installation, piezoelectric mic nettext projection, zine publication
performative and educational practices
Key Interventions:
Dec 7 installation by Miłosz Segedyn.
Dec 12 echo writing and ephemeral memorials.
Dec 14 rope exploration with Milena Nowak.
Dec 15 a collaborative zine making.
Participants:
mariia Lemperk (idea), Mariia Varlygina (curator), Milena Nowak (rope artist), Miłosz Segedyn (installation).
Screens contributions:
Baszta, BREASTMILK, Cyane Findji and Genietta Varsi, Disko Peter, Eva Holts, Juliana Irene Smith, Kaja Jałoza, LUZI, Mano Glonti, Margherita Mezzetti, mariia & Lars*, mii boreck, Mo Tomaszewska, Persons supporting Bezkres Foundation, PimPa, Sara Blosseville, Sebastian Grygo, Stanisław E. Łuczak, Stefa Gosiewsk, Vitaliia Shchelkanova, Vlad Tretiak, Zuzanna Marchelewich.
Dec 7 installation by Miłosz Segedyn.
Dec 12 echo writing and ephemeral memorials.
Dec 14 rope exploration with Milena Nowak.
Dec 15 a collaborative zine making.
Participants:
mariia Lemperk (idea), Mariia Varlygina (curator), Milena Nowak (rope artist), Miłosz Segedyn (installation).
Screens contributions:
Baszta, BREASTMILK, Cyane Findji and Genietta Varsi, Disko Peter, Eva Holts, Juliana Irene Smith, Kaja Jałoza, LUZI, Mano Glonti, Margherita Mezzetti, mariia & Lars*, mii boreck, Mo Tomaszewska, Persons supporting Bezkres Foundation, PimPa, Sara Blosseville, Sebastian Grygo, Stanisław E. Łuczak, Stefa Gosiewsk, Vitaliia Shchelkanova, Vlad Tretiak, Zuzanna Marchelewich.
Dec 7
, 2024
echo writing
bit scanned before recycling into a new paper and dryed on the dirt of the ruins walls.Dec 12
, 2024
[a tower was built here, the ruins are here now]
Untower Rituals of Disassembly
Undoing Institutional Pressure
Un-Tower Tryouts, a collaborative artistic project that invites participants to rethink power, connection, and creativity through questioning the possibility of non-hierarchical engagement.
Un-Tower Tryouts unfolds as a dual-action project:
On one level, it is a series of artistic interventions that bring participants together to reimagine the ruins of the tower. Participants enter the body of the ruin, bringing it closer to themselves and through tenderness toward it they make the tryouts as acts of resistance against the violent climate of vertical structures. On another level, it serves as a metaphorical deconstruction of the tower itself — a movement outward.
text by Mariia Varlygina.
How changes the choreography of co-presence compositions with the active sense of the temporality of alliances?
notes on memory capitalism:
Memory is a practice of a non-naturalization of the oblivion. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, the oblivion of oblivion we forget that we are forgotten, forget we forgot. Reproduction of social relationships replies to the so-called ideological experientiality of time.
Let’s view capitalism as one of the many ways of organizing time, and social relationships where the multiple living reaffirmed the micro-temporality of living - review what are the temporary ways to relate to time. Our time is not our time. With the compulsory isolation the time relating becomes a separate structure.
Micro-temporality — the fragmented, fleeting experiences of the present moment — emerges as the dominant mode of living in late-stage capitalism. Micro-remembrance, the individual is subjected to a constant cycle of disjointed temporality, which reaffirms the notion that life is lived in bursts of consumable moments, shaped and structured by the demands of the patriarchy coded ideology.
The protection of memory as a communal resource, outside the forces of commodification and control often viewed as a practiced utopia.
Recomend to have a look on Carolina Ré’s, Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), and Ana Carolina Barbosa’s, Universidade Federal da Bahia (Brazil), writings.
Poland
2023-ongoing
record of the editions:
docs.google.com/document/
Location: Goethe Institute, Cracow
19.12.2023, 18:00 – opening durational action;
20.12.2023 – BREASTMILK trio appearance;
31.12.2023, 12:00 – noise concert, D. Kowalik i mariia Lemperk.
2st edition
02.07-01.09.2024
Location:Cloakroom gallery, Cricoteka, Kraków.
Curator: Kamil Kuitkowski
sound layer:
bandcamp 31st
Noise, sound/movement experiment, research-based, performative (actionist) duo.
31.12.2023 - “PAIN GAME” noise concert, Goethe Institute Krakau.
3.07–1.09 2024 - “PAIN GAME: second station” exhibition, Cricoteca.
31.12.2024 - “PAIN GAME: second station” noise concert, Cricoteca.
Location: ASP Kraków, Dom Utopii.
People involved: Dominik Stanisławski, Łukasz Trzciński, dr Tomasz Bielecki, dr Sławomir Biernat, mariia Lemperk.
Location: Goethe Institute, Kraków.
People involved: Łukasz Trzciński, mariia Lemperk, Dominik Stanisławski, Dorota Krakowska, Dr. Claus Heimes, participants.
Location: Goethe Institute, Kraków.
People involved: D. Kowalik, Łukasz Trzciński, mariia Lemperk.
Location: Goethe Institute and Wisła River, Kraków.
Practice: Rearranged after the check-in emotional silent practice of burning. Lead by BREASTMILK, accompanied by Dziad.
| Table transport: two approaches to entering space. |
Vase-shaped objects making,
protecting the gallerie’s floors,
changing the tabletop,
collecting hair (Zuzanna, Kaja, Karolina, Ernest, Szymon, Sos, Ula, BolekiSmolek, mariia),
PAIN GAME: Walking Cane
16.09.2025, Dresden, dasKONZERTs
Poland / Germany / Ukraine
2022 - ongoing
4 selections,
work with gifted and personal archives.
2023 - ongoing
RANDOM DOCUMENTATION:
acidentaly symbolic,
BREASTMILK
(breastinpeacemilk)
2024 - Kem School Warsaw, a queer-feminst educational program, performative process of learning & unlearning
and a reflection on collective forms of resistance.
2023 - Art School workshops on Feminist Care practices, organized by the UKEN Doctoral School, Cracow, Poland.
2019-2022 - Pedagogical University, The faculty of Art and Media, Cracow, Poland.
2014-2018 - Grekov Art School, Department of fine arts, Odesa, Ukraine.
Solo [selected]
2024 - Project Un-Tower Tryouts, curated by Mariia Varlygina, made with Milena Nowak, Miłosz Segedyn and everybody involved, Cracow, Baszta gallery.
2024 - Project PAIN GAME (second station): mariia Lemperk, Łukasz Trzciński and D. Kowalik, curated by Kamil Kuitkowski, Cracow, Cloackroom, Cricoteka.
2023 - Project PAIN GAME with curatiorial support of Łukasz Trzciński, Cracow, Goethe Institut.
2023 - Project "To sew onto life" with curatorial support of Valeriya Plehotko and Sonia Yukhimova, Kyiv, Avangarden.
2023 - Personal exhibition "Underskin ruins" & BREASTMILK trio debut, Cracow, Rynek Główny, 29.
2023 - Project "To sew onto life" with curatorial support of Valeriya Plehotko and Sonia Yukhimova, Berlin, Art Space in Exile.
2022 - Personal exhibition "Not Forever" curated by Valeriya Plehotko, Cracow, I! Gallery.
Group [selected]
2025 - "Fragilities|space, memory, body", artists: Christian Rupp, Lars* Kollros, Mariia Lemperk and Patrick Topitschnig, Athens.
2025 - "CHEAPARTWEEK|Let's Connect", Athens.
2024 - "ProtestKunst & ProtestKultur", Munich, AAP Archive Artist Publications.
2024 - "If I Can Not Cry In The Subway" curated by Julia Fidder, Helsinki, Oksasenkatu11 gallery.
2023 - "COMMON SPACE: COUNTRYSIDE - CITY" , Curators: Anna-Helena Klumpen and Katrin Savvulidi, Viechtach, Altes Spital.
2022 - "Let them wave! Contemporary Polish Sewn Sculpture", Curators: Stanisław Małecki i Leszek Golec, Venice, Studio Cannaregio.
2022 - "Wiadomość z pokoju obok", Cracow, Podbrzezie art gallery, curated by Rzeczy Same collective.
2022 - Group exhibition and online-project "Skądinąd #1", Warsaw, curated by Turnus collective.
2022 - Group exhibition of Ukrainian art, Cologne, Яeclaim Award.
2021 - "CAMOUFLAGE" curated by Maria Ciborowska and Weronika Ptak, Cracow, Ufo art gallery.
2017 - "Night of museums" Odesa, Bleshchunov Museum.
Residences
2024 - SYRO, Cracow, Poland.
2024 - Artist-in-residence, Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Cracow, Poland.
2023 - Artist-in-residence, Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Cracow, Poland.
2023 - Artist-in-residence, Utopia Home, Cracow, Poland.
2023 - Artist-in-residence, SCHIESSLHAUS AiR in Kollburg, Germany.
2022 - Artist-in-residence, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research), Germany.
Public performances [selected]
2024 - Open form theatrical play/performance "Kissing a Rock", Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Cracow, Poland.
2024 - Part of "ŁYS" choreografed by ana szopa, choreographic oders NiMIT, Kafe (NGOS), Craców, Łaźnia Nowa.
2024 - Performance of ana szopa, mariia Lemperk and D. Kowalik, Warsaw, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art.
2024 - Performance "Body-Spring-War-Teeth-Clay-IceCream", Cracow, Poczta Główna.
2024 - Performance with a random duration "Kissing a Rock", Munich, Habibi Kiosk, Munich Kammerspiele.
2024 - Pre-opening durational performance "Odesa Lemperk 05.01.24" with curatorial support of Julia Fidder, Helsinki, Oksasenkatu11 gallery.
2023 - Noise concert "PAIN GAME with Dawid Kowalik, Cracow, Goethe Institut.
2023 - BREASTMILK appearance at the "PAIN GAME", Cracow, Goethe Institut.
2023 - Participatory action "PAIN GAME" with curatiorial support of Łukasz Trzciński, Cracow, Goethe Institut.
2023 - Performance "Two hours rock kissing", Cracow, Rzeczy Kolektyw.
2023 - Performance "Table for Boichukists" with sound-artist Gizem Oruc in the framework of the UFFB screening of the "ADA" film, Berlin, Silent Green.
2023 - Performance "I am kissing a rock" in the framework of the openning of "Common Ground" exhibition, Viechtach, Sciesslhaus Air, Altes Spital.
2023 - Performance "Underskin ruins", Lublin, Performance Platform, Labirynt gallery.
2023 - Durational performance, two days of "Self-objectifing sessions", Lublin, Performance Platform, Labirynt gallery.
2023 - Performative concert "Let's call it a date" with sound-artists Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoglu and Gizem Oruc, Deggendorf, Café Holler.
2023 - Public performance "Underskin ruins", Berlin, Hatun-Sürücü-Brücke.
2023 - Performance "Krajka" and artist talk with Małgorzata Mirga-Tas with curatorial support of Natalie Keppler, moderation by Małgrzata Markiewicz, Berlin, DAAD gallery.
2022 - Performance seriess, 30 days of "Everyday single picket "?", Cracow, Rynek Glowny.
Printed publications [selected]
2023 - "Grieve with me" - Julia Fidder, artistic contribution to the book publication, 25 copies edition, PUBLICS, Helsinki.
2023 - "To sew onto life" zine publication, 2 copies edition, AAP collection.
2023 - "Galya carries water" zine publication in collaboration with Zeynep Ayse Hatipoglu, Published by Paul Wick, 20 copies edition, Supported by Shciesslhaus Air residency program, AAP collection.
2022 - "Family memory glitch" zine publication, 10 copies, supported by Andrzej Najder.
2021 - "Lydia's branch" art book publication, supported by Michał Łuczak.
2021 - "Ankieta" zine publication, 2 copies, supported by Michał Łuczak.
Collaborative practices [selected]
2025 - Collective "KLEJ"
2024 - Cross-media duo "One Vivid Orange Wall" with Ana Szopa.
2024 - Ongoing common project "Holding a Fire".
2024 - Noise-performance duo "31st" with Dawid Kowalik.
2023 - family-like BREASTMILK trio collective.
2023 - Acting in the new film of ukrainian independent filmmaker and queer-artist AntiGonna.
2023 - Embroidery participation in the "Kurtyna Kobiet" project of Małgorzata Markiewicz.
2023 - Acting performance for the Volkan Ergen's music video "The Same".
2023 - Sound-performance trio with Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoglu and Gizem Oruc.
2022 - Participation in the Małgorzata Markiewicz's "Pimoa Chthulu" performance.