Nadia Markiewicz is a visual artist and performer whose practice centers on disability, corporeality, and the politics of representation. Engaging in installation, video, and performance, she challenges dominant narratives of otherness by presenting her own body as a site of agency and confrontation.

Nadia Markiewicz is a Polish visual and performance artist based in Warsaw. Her practice explores themes of disability, corporeality, and the politics of representation. Her practice spans installation, video, and performance, engaging directly with the politics of otherness through her own body as both subject and medium. Markiewicz draws on her personal experience of physicality to challenge and subvert conventional narratives surrounding deformity and marginalization, presenting disability as a form of strength and resilience. Her work navigates the boundaries of visual culture, confronting aesthetic norms and positioning non-normative bodies as sites of agency and confrontation within contemporary art.

Currently pursuing a PhD at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Markiewicz earned her MFA in Spatial Activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under the mentorship of Prof. Mirosław Bałka and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She also completed an internship at the Studio of Performance at FaVU VUT in Brno, under Julie Béna and Jakub Jansa.

Markiewicz’s solo exhibitions include Mutants at Galeria EL, Elbląg (2024), Daredevil at the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Słupsk (2023), and DRIVE-THRU at Galeria Miejska Arsenał, Poznań (2022). She has presented work at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (Freak Show – Ballad of the Withering Rose segment, 2024), Zachęta National Gallery of Art (The Lonesome Wing, 2024), and Exposium, Zagreb (Ballad of the Withering Rose, 2024).

Her performances and installations have also been shown at major exhibitions, including Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2025), the Łzy Szczęścia (Tears of Joy) at Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2024) and the 25th Gabrovo Biennial, Bulgaria (2022). Markiewicz received the Europe Beyond Access Award from Zachęta National Gallery of Art and the British Council (2021) and was awarded the Grand Prix at the 10th Rybie Oko Young Art Biennial (2022). In 2023, she completed a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York City.

Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; the Zachęta National Gallery of Art; the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk; and various private collections in Poland and USA.

Artworks

Ballad of the Withering Rose

Daredevil

Mutans

Drive Thru 

Kubaparis  

Nadia Markiewicz: Drive-Thru

The Lonesome Wing, 2024

Performance at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw

Nadia Markiewicz plays the role of a fictional, historical freak – a performer known under the stage name The Lonesome Wing, who, according to rumors, was born with the wing of a white bird instead of one arm. Previously employed in a traveling circus and as a magician's dove, she reappears to perform after years of absence.

Tears of Joy (Łzy szczęscia) exhibition curated by Maria Brewińska, Michał Jachuła, Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło, Joanna Kordjak

Costume production Wisła Nicieja
Photos by Julia Dorobińska