Ewa Sułek is an art historian, curator, writer and researcher based in Warsaw, Poland. She studied art history at the University of Warsaw and the University of Cambridge. Her main research interests include contemporary Ukrainian art, postcolonialism, and relationships between art and politics. She is currently working on her PhD thesis carried out at the “Academia Copernicana” Interdisciplinary Doctoral School at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Author of the book “Chłopak z pianinem. O sztuce i wojnie na Ukrainie” (The boy with the piano. On art and war in Ukraine, PWN, Warsaw 2018). She has also published multi-awarded short stories and theatre plays. Together with Paweł Zaręba, she founded and runs the Lescer Art Center in Zalesie Górne near Warsaw. This space for contemporary art practices hosts exhibitions and other events with the participation of Polish, Ukrainian, and international artists, including art residencies. 

Ewa Sułek received the Fulbright Junior Research Award 2021-2022 to carry out her research project at the Ukrainian Research Institute at the Harvard University. 

Project Description

Ewa Sułek is currently working on the PhD research project entitled Museology and Curatorial Strategies in War-torn Post-soviet Kyiv that examines the processes of transformation of cultural space in Kyiv. Four art institutions founded in independent Ukraine and located in Kyiv, which represent four different institutional models, have been chosen for the project: Pinchuk Art Center, Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex, IZOLYATSIA Platform For Cultural Initiatives (previously in Donetsk) and Visual Culture Research Center. Ewa Sułek studies the cultural institutions and their architecture as spaces of postcolonial and post-Soviet transformation. She looks at how the processes of decolonization are manifested in the cultural, linguistic, and narrative politics of four chosen contemporary art institutions in Kyiv, and whether efforts are made to deal with the legacy of the colonial (Soviet) past. She is particularly interested in the processes of collecting, contextualizing, and exposition of artworks, study of the curatorial and institutional narratives, and study of the art spaces as the centres of meaning, in order to conceptualize each space as a place. She explores the art centers as symbolic spaces that construct, but also mirror, beliefs and values. The overriding goal of the project is to understand the processes related to decolonization which took place in Ukraine after 2014.