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Katarzyna Perlak is a Polish-born contemporary artist based in London, UK. Her multidisciplinary practice includes moving image, performance, textiles, sculpture and installation and explores how history, tradition and identity are constructed, remembered and embodied. Drawing on feminist, queer and diasporic perspectives, she re-examines folklore, craft and affect as alternative forms of knowledge, and investigates the potential of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present, continuous experience and past historical moments.

Employing a notion of tender crafts, Perlak considers how heritage practices and traditions can be revisited and re-imagined through contemporary feminist, queer and migrant lenses. Engaging affective truths such as myths, tales, dreams, desires and collective memory, her work foregrounds intimacy and emotion while problematizing how history is written and how traditions are represented, particularly in relation to dominant cultural narratives and their exclusions.

Perlak's background is in Philosophy, which she studied in Poland and Fine Art Media that she has studied in the UK (Camberwell College of Arts and Slade School of Fine Art). She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with exhibitions and screenings at institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (NYC), ONE Archives (LA), Liverpool Biennial, Detroit Art Week, and many others. Her work has been acquired by the Arts Council Collection.

About the Film

Commissioned for Liverpool Biennial 2025 (BEDROCK), Set within the decaying opulence of the Adelphi Hotel, this film inhabits a site dense with memory, fantasy, and unresolved histories. Once a destination for wealthy travellers, the hotel’s deteriorating interiors now fuel legends and myths. Through a non-linear, dreamlike structure shaped by repetition and disorientation, the film draws on the affective language of horror to explore queer becoming under conditions of precarity. The Adelphi is reimagined as a haunted architecture where desire lingers, bodies shift, and identities remain unstable, allowing decay, monstrosity, and transformation to become sites of intimacy, resistance, and possibility.

Image credit: 'The land beneath sleeps lightly' (2025), Katarzyna Perlak, video still.