Zuzanna Czebatul

By deploying monumental relics, commemorative infrastructures, and architectural interventions, Zuzanna Czebatul examines how political ideology produces an aesthetics of power, and how that aesthetic can be destabilized. Her sculptural vocabulary draws on columns, obelisks, tapestries, archaeological fragments, and other architectural displays that twist or renegotiate the values they traditionally uphold. “Building up to better break down” describes her approach: she remodels the aesthetics of power into a powerful aesthetic charged with transformative potential.

Working with a wide range of materials and tongue-in-cheek formats, Czebatul’s practice moves between the solemn and the playful, the pristine and the abject, the sober and the erotic. Styrofoam sphinxes guard their riddle; inflatable columns insist on their stance; hand-poured concrete masquerades as marble; diabolical carpets invite transgression. These gestures disrupt dominant narratives of persistence, stability, and grandeur by introducing ephemerality, decay, and fluidity–conditions closer to lived experience.

Born into a family that left post-Soviet Poland in 1991 for newly reunified Germany, Czebatul’s work is shaped by early encounters with ideological rupture and systemic transformation. Experiences of displacement and unstable belonging form the ground from which her practice emerges. Familiarity with political collapse becomes a lens through which she approaches contemporary conditions with heightened critical sensitivity.

Czebatul dissects monumentality and power not as fixed entities, but as social constructs, material agreements sustained through form. She departs from singular sculptural objecthood and instead conceives sculpture as spatial and social environment. Her installations expose and reconfigure the power relations embedded in architectural tropes; her monumental forms soften, collapse, melt, or entangle, renegotiating both material authority and future function.

Rather than transmitting clear-cut messages, Czebatul’s work produces a moment of friction: an irritation that unsettles certainty and reassembles the urgent questions of the present.