Dagmara Genda

A quote by Witold Gombrowicz lies at the heart of Dagmara Genda's long-running methodology of cutting and recombining sources in ever-changing ways. In his last book, Cosmos (1965), Gombrowicz asks how many ways the letters of the alphabet can be rearranged as an analogy for the contingency of meaning. This question is embodied by his characters, whose journey is led by arbitrary connections such as the discovery of an arrow shape embedded in the texture of a stucco ceiling.

From tracing out secrets hidden in walls to fugitive lines meandering through buildings in the form of large-scale sculptural interventions, Genda highlights and articulates characteristics from her environment as well as from particular histories, in order to recombine them into something new. She traces out the texture of a wall with brush and ink in order to make visible a history of repairs, paint and material, or she summarises a book to one page by cutting into it and forming a new narrative via space and absence. Similarly, art history is a source material that can be traced, as it was in a recent public art project in two schools in East Berlin, for which an older building adorned with a series of mosaics by GDR artist Lutz Rudolf was demolished. The geometric forms were as if “peeled” from their surfaces and allowed to hang and float in the new buildings as a series of errant lines.

At Fonderie Darling, Genda continues “peeling” drawings from their surfaces and forcing them to make do in physical space. With new metal sculptures and paper works, she works with and against gravity to bring the logic of the page into 3-dimensional space.

Biography

Dagmara Genda works as an artist and freelance writer. She immigrated to Canada from Poland as a child, and has lived in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Anchorage, Toronto, London, ON, Saskatoon, Guelph, as well as London, UK. Since 2017, she has been living in Berlin. From the foundation of drawing, her work expands into sculpture, installation and public art. Recent projects include Untitled (For Lutz 1978/2024) for the middle and secondary schools in former East Berlin, as well as the two-part work, [ɡəˈhøːɐ̯], for the district court in Königs Wusterhausen. She has exhibited at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Kai 10, Düsseldorf; Arp Museum, Remagen; Esker Foundation, Calgary, among others. As both an artist and writer, she is interested in extra-institutional contexts, like when she organized an eight-person exhibition, Something Was Coming Upon Us, in a Berlin apartment from which she and all other tenants were evicted due to real estate speculation.

Recent exhibitions

2025	Diagonal, group exhibition, Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge, Berlin, DE
2024	Schall & Rauch, group exhibition, Basement Berlin, Berlin, DE Untitled (For Lutz 1978/2024), public art commission, middle and high school in the Allee der Kosmonauten, Berlin, DE
2023	[ɡəˈhøːɐ̯], public art commission, District Court Königs Wusterhausen, Berlin, DE Reorganization of One Hedge, public art commission, Kennedy Subway Station, Toronto, ON, CA The Corners of the Cloud, group exhibition, Alte Feuerwache, Berlin, DE
2022	Gulliver’s Sketchbook, group exhibition, Kai 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, DE