ABOUT

Maria Kossak is a Berlin-based multimedia and performance artist of Polish descent. She was born behind the Iron Curtain into a family of artists and writers. Due to the oppressive political climate and her family’s subsequent emigration, she found herself in West Berlin during the late Cold War period. Throughout the 1980s, the divided city became her childhood playground, and life in Berlin shaped not only her personal but also her artistic identity. Following family inclination, Kossak studied painting, photography and new media at the Sydney College of Arts in Australia, and visual and performance art at the University of Fine Arts (UdK) in Berlin, from which she graduated with special honors. For the past two decades she has lived and worked in the district of Neukölln.

Since childhood, Kossak has lived with chronic illness, bringing episodes of severe immobility and excruciating pain. Moving between strength and stillness, she has come to understand impermanence and limitation not as endpoints but as the ground from which resilience and renewal emerge.

Kossak’s art has been exhibited within and outside of Europe and is represented in international collections.” – Joanna Kiliszek, curator