Katarzyna Łukasik
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Katarzyna Łukasik's MPhil/PhD Art research project
Shocking Periphery
This practice-based doctoral project will rehearse a ‘potential history’ of Poland’s reintegration into international capital markets after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Through filmmaking and written thesis I will produce a series of counter narrative refusals of the implementation of the liberal-economic Shock Therapy carried out under the infamous Margaret Thatcher slogan ‘there is no alternative’. This transformation paved the way to a recession of unparalleled proportions, while dismantling socialist infrastructures of the economy and the state.
On the 1st of January 1990 the Polish Parliament ratified ten bills containing the so-called Balcerowicz Plan, often referred to by its opponents as ‘shock without therapy’ or ‘Bing Bang’. The package of bills was drafted – ‘using as a model the theory of F.A Hayek and Milton Friedman and the practical applications of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher’.
The rapid privatisation led to the selling out of industrial and financial sectors – in some cases for as little as 10 percent of their estimated value. As a result, at the end of the 1990s ‘foreign capital controlled 35 percent of Poland’s industrial stock, 70 percent of its banking assets and 80 percent of its print media’.
Another aspect of this transformation was an introduction of property laws that enabled rapid privatisation of estates and land that led to forcible evictions of occupants. Poland’s working class paid the biggest price for this liberal-economic transformation as the country saw a rapid surge in unemployment, poverty, and inequality.
Still from Shocking Periphery (2024), by Katarzyna Łukasik
Beyond a critical investigation of the introduction of neoliberal market logic in Eastern Europe, my PhD engages in modes of speculation on the reversal of the economic transformation.
Activating various research methodologies – theoretical inquiries, investigative journalism, site specific and archive visits – I will critically examine the transformation of the legal-institutional framework to enshrine the ‘free market’ ideology. Furthermore, I will analyse the human rights discourse employed to obscure and justify the reintroduction of private property laws.
As an artist-filmmaker, writer and researcher I situate my craft as tools for storytelling and imagining otherwise. While engaging with key sites and figures crucial to the unfolding of aforementioned events, I will create visual and textual political imaginary, that speaks to the material possibility of different economic scenarios. Creating a grammar that holds multiplicity of voices across past, present and future.
Supervisors
Researcher biography
Katarzyna Łukasik looks at the relationship between imperialism and periphery. She examines conflicting notions of political imaginary as both means of erasure and potential.
In her artistic practice she investigates the economic and cultural subjugation of Eastern Europe, treated as the testing ground for realisation of Western and Eastern imperial fantasies, tracing histories of imperial formations, and neoliberalism.
Through fictionalised narratives she seeks to retrieve the political possibility of worldly cocitizenship and the commons, re-writing the periphery as a site of resistance and potential.
She holds an MA in Forensic Architecture from Goldsmiths University of London.
Her work has been screened and exhibited across the UK. Together with Daisy Smith and Rufus Rock she curates Mascara Film Club, which creates a space for screening artists’ works outside of institutional organisations, in a more convivial setting, fostering a self-organised infrastructure for moving image practitioners.