In spring 2025, we invited Agnieszka Szczotka to the Roberts Institute of Art Residency in Scotland.
Agnieszka Szczotka
April–May 2025
Agnieszka Szczotka is a Polish-born performance artist based between the UK and Poland. Concerned with the politics and potentialities of the body, her carefully staged work questions the stability of narrative, whether personal or historical. Her writing carries layers of translation, memory and tradition through which language becomes a supple, absurdist plaything.
Mining the grotesque, erotic, everyday and transcendent, Agnieszka’s personas channel varied spirits, from the artist’s grandmother with her beloved Western-imported romance novellas to the decapitated head of Lady Jane Grey.
During her time in residence, Agnieszka used the surrounding landscape and natural environment to develop new lines of enquiry in her writing and performance practice. Drawing on themes of language, miscommunication and connection, she produced a text that may evolve into a future performance.
Her intention had been to explore daily rituals and their connection to making, performance and spiritual practice. She brought to the residency a set of weather journals belonging to her grandfather — decades of meticulously handwritten observations and notes. These inspired her to begin a new text about attentive repetition as a quiet act of devotion and acknowledging the limits and gaps inherent within classification systems.
Partway through her residency, a visit to the nearby RSPB site at Loch of Kinnordy provoked a shift in her thinking and approach to her time in residence. She was inspired to start writing a new text reflecting on her awareness of being unable to identify any of the birds — a moment that also drew her into a deeper reflection on her father, a devoted bird watcher.
This text is concerned with her experience of grappling with language and articulation, and of attempting to find a deeper understanding of a person without having the right tools to do so. On a more universal level, she explores questions around translation, understanding and emotional connection.
Sky is a pale blue tissue hung evenly between the trees. We are having breakfast in the sun. Sour summer fruits, defrosted overnight and mixed into the warmth of the porridge, distort our mouths. Still fragrant of burnt, roasted seeds, they crack between the teeth. Listening to the bird song, I can only distinguish a crow. Nothing else. In the language of birds, I am illiterate.
I think of my father in his camouflage clothing, hiding in the bushes like a pervert. He holds onto his camera, long heavy lenses pointing into the same sky, waiting to capture his prey and I wonder if the same song reaches his ears. I wonder if he would have been able to distinguish the singers, since he has been gawking at them for years during his many escapades into forests, wetlands and meadows. But even if he told me their names, I wouldn’t have known them in English without aiding myself with an online translator. This is a language within a language I have never learnt. (Extract from Birds, 2025)
You can read the full text here.
While these two separate projects emerged from different moments during her residency for Agnieszka they are both connected to being attuned to her surroundings, considering language and shifts between internal and external landscapes.
Following her time in Scotland, Agnieszka will continue developing these texts with a view to transforming them into performance.
Removed from the urgency of producing a finished work, the residency offered me freedom to follow my instincts and explore various strands of research that emerged organically during my stay.
The solitary nature of the experience opened up spaces of discomfort which led me to reconsider what is important to me in this moment in time. Surrounded by the vastness of the landscape and devoid of the stimulus of the city I was able to find places of stillness within myself which are crucial to me as a performer.
— Agnieszka Szczotka