Iza Koczanowska

Koczanowska is an interdisciplinary artist and set designer who brings together research, archival materials, and interior architecture formats. Through specific locations, sociological and geopolitical contexts, they engages, determining and informing both the materiality and the media of each of her works.

She primarily works with installations but also frequently engages with photography, treating it as a record of performative actions. By allowing technology to be one of her main means of creating sculptures and immersive spaces, she animates other spaces and figures, revealing hidden and obscured elements. Her artistic research focuses on alternative and speculative models of tourism, explored through spatial, temporal, and sensory methodologies.

She is interested in how tourism functions not only as an economy of leisure, but also as a collective coping mechanism in times of ecological crisis, social disorientation, and global uncertainty. She examines the intersections between escapist tendencies, ritual, environmental transformation, and digital mediation of space, paying particular attention to spaces affected by political or climatic disaster, where tourism overlaps with geotourism and dark tourism.

Her work enhances interactivity as a tool for encouraging the viewer not only to enter but also to become an integral part of the work, sculpture, or space. She utilizes haptic illusion, blending apparently similar materials that feel different upon touch, subverting the semantics of the artwork as a mere object. She references the imitative qualities and artificiality informing contemporary reality. Scenographic methods, small-scale models, theoretical and on-site research come together with embodied experience and performative gestures. Her practice engages with dispossession, dysfunctional space, and ritual as strategies of coexistence and resistance within late capitalist landscapes.