Barbara Kubska

Barbara Kubska is a visual artist and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, where she works as an assistant in the Photography Department. Her academic and artistic practice focuses on multi-layered histories, archives, and collections, examining issues related to memory through the lens of cultural transformations. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on the contemporary reception of Zygmunt Kubski's photographs, combining personal context with themes of political entanglement.

Kubska employs methods drawn from autoethnography and works in the spirit of artistic research, allowing her to combine the language of text and image. Her research interests include cultural memory, identity formation, archival practices, and the visual representation of historical trauma. She approaches photographic archives from both personal and analytical perspectives, seeking alternative historical narratives and challenging familiar patterns of interpretation.

Her notable projects include 'Time Unlost' (2022), which examines her grandfather's photographs of Tychy residents; 'Mathematic Structures Of Events' (2021), exploring intergenerational trauma; and 'Great-Grandmas Of Fear' (2020), investigating inherited emotional patterns. In 2024, she received the KPO for Culture scholarship to work on 'New technologies in artistic activities – critical work from the photographic archive of Zygmunt Kubski,' incorporating Arduino and AI technologies into her artistic practice.

• KPO for Culture scholarship (2024)
• Marshal of Silesian Voivodeship's Scholarship in the area of culture
• Metropolitan Science Support Fund grant (2022-2024)

Kubska is the co-founder of Bio Craft Lab and was a member of the Image Culture Foundation from 2016 to 2024. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Poland, including at the Municipal Museum in Tychy, Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom, BWA Gallery of Contemporary Art in Katowice, and Wrocław Contemporary Museum. She frequently collaborates with other artists, writers, and researchers, creating interdisciplinary projects that bridge visual arts, literature, and cultural studies.

Her studio practice involves working with historical photographic archives, particularly those documenting post-war urban development in Poland, while integrating contemporary technologies to create new visual contexts and interpretations. She is particularly interested in how personal family histories intersect with broader historical narratives and how visual archives can be reinterpreted to reveal alternative perspectives on the past.