Anna Raczyńska (born in Bielsko-Biała, Poland) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, lecturer and researcher whose work is characterised by her keen interest in socio-political and socio-cultural issues.
In particular, she focuses on the ongoing transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, from the remnants of Soviet communism to the rise of neoliberal capitalism in mass society. She questions the structural tensions between East and West, country and city, labour and capital, money and status, and the complex power relations of intersectionality.
A key focus of her recent artistic and academic work is the concept of labour in its material and immaterial forms, including the feminist dimension of emotional labour. Drawing on feminist theory and critical labour studies, Raczyńska demonstrates the deep intertwining of affective, relational and care-oriented practices with global economic systems. In this context, her work highlights the contradictions between the abstract logic of capitalism and the experiential realities of the body, emotion and everyday life.
Her artistic methodology is based on an expanded understanding of sculpture. Using a variety of media and techniques, such as digital prints, 3D animations, objects, videos, large-scale installations and immersive environments, she blurs the boundaries between the digital and analogue worlds. She reconfigures everyday and mass-produced objects through changes in size, materiality and form, transforming the familiar into critical reflections on work, value and power. By juxtaposing synthetic industrial materials with organic, tactile fabrics, she articulates a dialectic between the artificial and the natural, and the permanent and the ephemeral.
Another conceptual level of Raczyńska’s work is semiotics. By translating spoken and written language into visual codes, pictograms and signs., she establishes immediate yet transient links between words, images, and objects. This approach positions her installations at the interface between communication and materiality, where meaning is constantly renegotiated rather than fixed. At the same time, she employs processes of construction and reconstruction, both material and conceptual, to comprehend, deconstruct and ultimately reassemble existing narratives. On a formal level, recurring motifs and materials from Slavic traditions and folklore collide with a cold, post-industrial aesthetic, revealing the mechanisms through which meaning, memory and identity are continuously produced and redefined.
This revisiting of the past, filtered through the digital zeitgeist, creates space for critical reflection on processes of social transformation and on the viewer’s own position within contemporary systems of affect, care and labour.
Raczyńska holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design Wroclaw, as well as a postgraduate degree in Media Art from the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely in Germany, Poland, England, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and has participated in residencies in France, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Her work is held in the collections of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony (Die Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen), the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundeskunstsammlung) and private collections. From October 2021 to March 2025, she was a lecturer and artistic associate in the class for Installation and Space at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB Leipzig).
