Underbelly Bar
Underbelly bar (2025) performance, installation; Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Cracow. Ruch, który wraca do ciała exhibition
+ Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
curators: Marta Lisok, Agnieszka Sachar
costume production: Monika Nyckowska
music: Marcel Pieczonka
exhibition design: Szymon Szewczyk
DOP: Horacy Muszyński
co-produced with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (curator Magdalena Komornicka, producer Kasia Szybińska)
The artist’s focus is on work with her own body. At the core of her performance is an interplay of concealment and revelation, through which she narrates her experience of disability and situations in which she felt subjected to an oppressive gaze. Markiewicz performs in a costume of her own design which resembles a fan of playing cards; only her face and her legs can be seen from behind it. What everyone can see all the time is the ornamental backs of a deck of cards. The moment and extent of revealing the rest is left to the performer’s discretion.
What Markiewicz derives from Jadwiga Sawicka’s work Belly is the connotation of the English word underbelly, describing something concealed and sensitive, and also connoting the demimonde, a sphere on the peripheries of the norm, outside the framework set for the law-abiding citizenry. In the stage set that she has created herself, the artist invokes the story of Gibsonton, Florida, a town inhabited by freak show performers. Due to their unusual bodies, such performing artists were perceived as people on the margin of society and as a threat to others. A number of public spaces were off limits to them, some merely by how they were designed. This is why their community arranged everything in Gibsonton to fit their needs, far from the evaluative gaze of accidental onlookers.
text from the catalogue, courtesy of Bunkier Sztuki Gallery