Małgorzata Markiewicz: interview

Krakow-based artist Małgorzata Markiewicz talks about her video The Resistance Kitchen (2017), responding to the policies from the current rightwing Polish government that violate women’s rights

In the video The Resistance Kitchen (2017), Markiewicz, responding to the policies from the current rightwing Polish government that violate women’s rights; tells us: “Things are going bad, to put it mildly. And not just here in Poland.”  Wearing military garb, Markiewicz presents the viewer with readily available natural poisonous ingredients, including belladonna, otherwise known as deadly nightshade, and lily of the valley. She proceeds to give instructions as to how to mix these plants into poisonous dishes. This, She tells us, “may be the only tool of resistance available to women”.

Also displayed in the Home Strike exhibition are tea towels printed with botanical-like drawings of poisonous plants, awarding them scientific credibility, and so Markiewicz, states the exhibition catalogue “turn[s] the tables on [a woman’s] obligation to nurture and cherish … confronting the bourgeois expectation for women to entertain [in the home] … that simultaneously renders them as complicit objects of desire”.

Home Strike
L’étrangère, London
8 March – 21 April 2018

Interview by MK PALOMAR
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY