Former UCL HoA Erasmus student Karolina Wilczyńska wins prestigious Fulbright Fellowship

Karolina graduated in Art History from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (UAM) and completed her Erasmus Programme with the History of Art Department at University College London (UCL). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University. The subject of her PhD research is the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. It is a part of a broader research programme aimed at a critical revision of socially engaged art, its methodology as well as its history – especially during a time of the neoliberal transition from Fordism to Postfordism. She believes that such artistic activity – operating various mediums – requires singular approach, a case study that explores the complex relationship between art and a social order. In 2018 she helped in organization of the East-Central European Art Forum. In 2019 she received the Library Research Grant at the J.F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universitat in Berlin.

Her Fulbright grant focuses on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s activity which is considered in terms of the broadly understood relation between art, neoliberalism and the choreography of bodies. Since 1969 Ukeles has been active as “a maintenance artist” in New York City performing complex social projects which oscillate around problems of labour, ecology and the ways the city is governed. Karolina is interested in the codependency and interactions between the urban space of New York City and citizens and workers choreography of everyday as well as a concept of waste and garbage in capitalism and the artist’s rethinking of the very idea of a maintenance that links everything together.