Polish Art Festival: Andrii Dostliev, Bart Urbański, Lia Dostlieva, Rafał Milach & Zofia Nierodzinska

Andrii Dostliev 

Andrii Dostliev is an artist, curator, and photography researcher from Ukraine, based in Poland. Andrii's primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, decolonial practices in Eastern Europe, gay history of Ukraine, and the limits of photography as a medium. Andrii's art practice works across photography, video, drawing, performance, and installation. Former visiting fellow at Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna) and artist-in-residence at Central European University (Budapest). Participant of the Ukrainian National Pavillion at Venice Biennale 2024.

 
Bart Urbański 

Bart Urbański is a Glasgow-based visual artist whose work engages with themes of belonging, memory, migration, and human connection. His practice draws on decolonial and post-socialist theory, combined with phenomenological methods, to explore how meaning and perception are shaped through personal and collective experience. Working with photography, data collection, and research, he moves fluidly between documentary and poetic forms, often drawing on conversations and fragments of everyday life.

Urbański holds an M.Res in Creative Practices and a BA in Communication Design from the Glasgow School of Art, and lectures in photography and digital imaging at West College Scotland. His educational practice mirrors his broader interests in storytelling, collaboration, and how images shape perception and relational experience.

His work has been exhibited in New York, Nantes, Singapore, and Glasgow, and featured in several photography platforms, including Lens Culture, DODHO, Edge of Humanity Magazine, PUNKT.HU, and TBD Ultramagazine.

 
Lia Dostlieva 

Lia Dostlieva is an artist, cultural anthropologist, and essayist. Her art and research practice engage with notions of collective trauma, decolonial narratives, and agency and visibility of vulnerable groups. She was a participant of the National Pavilion of Ukraine at the 60th Venice Biennale. She has exhibited her works at various international venues, including the Malta Biennale, Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Kolumba Museum (Cologne, Germany), Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum (Tbilisi, Georgia), National Museum of Fine Arts (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), and the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia), among others.
She is a 2024 CEC ArtsLink International Fellow, a 2023 Jan van Eyck Academie alumna (Maastricht, Netherlands), and a 2019 Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria). She writes for e-flux Journal, Dwutygodnik, Eurozine Magazine, Kajet Journal, Blok Magazine, and others. She is currently a PhD researcher at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.

 
Rafał Milach 

Rafal Milach is a professor at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School of Silesian University in Katowice, Poland. He has received scholarships from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Magnum Foundation, and European Cultural Foundation. Rafal is a finalist of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Polityka Passports Award, a winner of the Author Book Award at Rencontres Phototographiques d'Arles and World Press Photo contest. He is a co-founder of the Archive of Public Protests and Sputnik Photos collectives. His work has been widely exhibited, and is part of the public institutional collections worldwide. Rafal is a member of Magnum Photos.

 
Zofia Nierodzinska

Zofia Nierodzinska, a visual artist, curator, author of text and lecturer at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin (Poland); deputy director of the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznan between 2017 and 2022. She works on the art of post-socialist countries, with a special focus on migration. She studied at the University of Arts in Poznan (PhD) and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (MA). She lives and works in Berlin.