TITLE: The Great Sphinx

The project was created in collaboration with the performer Anna Kalwajtys, who created the character of a female sphinx. She played the role of an ironic figure in a plastic costume, who moves lightly and carefree in the Polish province. She is a bit like a flying plastic bag that gets caught in trees. However, her name indicates a more complicated philosophical context. The sphinx asks difficult existential questions about the essence of society. The project concerns topics related to anthropocene, but raises them in a very subversive, ironic way.

AUTHOR: Freya Frederic Collective (Dorota Chilinska, Anna Kalwajtys) (Poland)

Dorota Chilińska and Anna Kalwajtys are part of the collective Freya Frederyc. Their collaborative practice emerges through the process of constructing narratives about the lives of contemporary individuals / figures / societies within the contexts of nature, culture, and civilization. The photographic record is not only a documentation of the performance, but also a record of a staged moment—an idiosyncratic photographic session created by collaborating artists.

DOROTA CHILIŃSKA artist and curator, activist, and feminist.
She works with photography, installation, artistic film, and documentary. Her works have been shown, among others, at the WRO Festival, Mediations Biennale, Venice Biennale, in Prague, and Berlin. She has carried out projects promoting women’s art: Young (Młode), Rebelle, Sister Earth (Siostra Ziemia) and on intersectionality: Self/Other (Ja/Innego), ACT Accept, Care, Thrive. In her work and in her efforts to promote art, she emphasizes the value of collaboration, openness to the Other, and activism. Professionally, she is affiliated with Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.

ANNA KALWAJTYS visual artist, performer
In 2005, she graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, and in 2007, she completed a degree in intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. In 2006, she studied at the Faculty of Animation and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 2015, she received her PhD in Fine Arts for her work BBL Bios-Laboratory of the Body (Bios-Laboratorium Ciała). In 2020, she completed postgraduate studies in psychology at the University of Warsaw. Her performances address issues of corporeality and biologicality, the process of building cultural identity, the exclusion of weaker individuals from society, and existential borderline situations.