Taba Kiera

My background and current research

Born in Poland, having done studies in Scotland, Netherlands, and Sweden, and currently based in Berlin, I move through questions of transition, containment, and the thresholds between states—where something becomes something else, or resists becoming or dying entirely. Since a young age I intuitively understood that the self is not fixed, but rather in a constant flux of inner states and outer transformations, which resulted in me shape-shifting between a balerina, a punk, an entrepreneur, or an artist without being held back by fears or beliefs commonly imposed by society, or one's family. Looking back at my childhood, and my youth, I think that the inbetween states always interested and excited me more than the "finished" concept or product. I'm the kind of person that will ask "What does finished even mean and who gets to decide, why, and how? Alongside my visual practice, I have worked in physical theatre, writing and directing The Line, and collaborating with Antagon Theatre. And since 2019, I have practiced Vipassana meditation, which continues to shape my attention to process, perception, and the subtle thresholds between sensation and meaning. All these influences remain present in my approach to space, body, and transformation as something lived rather than represented.

My work inhabits the liminal space where life and matter, as well as body, object, and ritual intersect. Across painting, ceramics, bio-materials, and sculptural objects, I explore thresholds of embodiment: growth and decay, vitality and death, freedom and containment, and that subtle suspension between organic processes and constructed systems.

Working with materials that appear alive yet are held in tension, I investigate the moments where change is arrested, where the self becomes fixed, where control begins to replace movement. These works echo a broader human condition undersocial influence: the gradual freezing of perception within psychological and material structures.

My research centres on what I call the frozen self, and the conditions under which it begins to thaw. I study what happens when life is contained—when the body, or the self, becomes fixed, aestheticised, or numbed within systems that favour stability over transformation. I'm interested in exposing what those systems produce: inertia, disconnection, unconsciousness, and the subtle architectures that keep us suspended.

Informed by practices of attention, ritual, and embodied awareness—from contemplative traditions to experimental physical theatre—my work engages with consciousness not as an abstract idea, but as something sensed through material and form. It invites an encounter rather than an explanation: a slowing down into sensation, where the viewer becomes aware of the threshold within themselves—between control and surrender, opening a gateaway to all-encompassing consciousness of life and its inevitable transformation.

Situated within contemporary dialogues in bio-art, materiality, and body-based practices, my work reflects on how ancient rhythms—of decay, renewal, and deep time—persist within an increasingly engineered world, and how they might offer pathways back to a more fluid, less constrained experience of being.

My artistic practice in a larger context

Positioned at the intersection of contemporary bio-art, material exploration, and ritual-based practices, my work engages with questions of transformation, containment, and the politics of the body. It resonates with artistic and philosophical inquiries into living systems, ecological consciousness, and the fragile boundary between autonomy and control.

Across all media, I return to a central gesture: the suspension of the alive within the artificial.

In the paintings, organic forms emerge and are held in layered surfaces, as if caught mid-transformation—reflecting the tension between inner vitality and external structuring forces.
In the ceramics, forms borrow from growth patterns, erosion, and geological time, echoing a pre-rational relationship to matter, where objects were not separate from ritual, but part of a lived cosmology.
In the wearable sculptures, the body itself becomes the site of this threshold—not idealized or reshaped, but revealed as it is, resisting aesthetic control and cultural scripting.

All series different material articulations of the same inquiry: how life is shaped, slowed, controlled, or allowed to unfold.

Underlying this practice is an engagement with cycles that exceed the individual—decay and regeneration, fear of death and its cultural containment, the search for meaning through ritual, and the possibility of reclaiming perception from habitual patterns. Influences from somatic awareness, theatre practices that treat the body as a site of transformation, and psychological frameworks concerned with the development of the self all inform the work, not as references, but as embedded structures.

Across all media, the aim is to unfreeze perception:
to create conditions or pose an invitation for something to shift—subtly, internally, where the viewer is brought into contact with the living, unstable, and often uncomfortable reality beneath constructed forms. In this sense, the work is less about representation and more about encounter; a quiet invitation to step out of fixed identities and into a more fluid relationship with matter, body, and time.