Join us for a talk by Marta Romankiv as part of the Assembly accompanying the THIS IS FINE)) exhibition: “Fair Pay for Artistic Labour and Building a System of Fair Artist Fees.”
This event will focus on the realities of artistic labour, the challenges artists face, and possible ways forward. The discussion will begin with Good Job, a project by Marta Romankiv, Dominik Stanisławski, and Łukasz Surowiec, presented at the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków.
In this project, the artists turn their attention to a part of museum work that usually remains invisible and is considered outside the realm of artistic practice: renovation and maintenance. Over the course of a month, they renovated MOCAK’s Beta Gallery in preparation for upcoming exhibitions, transforming the institution’s infrastructure itself into a site of artistic practice. The project contributed to a broader discussion about artists’ working conditions, particularly the issue of fair compensation in relation to other professions.
The event will also explore possibilities for artists’ self-organization through the example of Poland. We will discuss the initiatives and advocacy work of the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art, an association working to improve the conditions of artistic labour.
EVENT DETAILS
- July 29, 6:30 PM
- Jam Factory Art Center, 124 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho St., Auditorium
- Participation is free with prior registration.
About the speaker
Marta Romankiv was born in Lviv. She is an interdisciplinary artist, sociologist, creator of installations, video works, and socially engaged projects, and a lecturer at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce.
She holds master’s degrees from the Academy of Art in Szczecin and the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 2025, she received her PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Maria Anto and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven International Art Prize (2023) and the Allegro Prize (2020), and was awarded a Gaude Polonia residency scholarship by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2021.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Dresden State Art Collections, Kunsthalle Rostock, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and the National Museum of Moldova in Chișinău.
Her artistic practice focuses on social inequality, approaching art as a space for imagining and proposing alternative futures. She pays particular attention to migration, civil rights, and labour rights. Most of her projects are participatory, operating at the intersection of activism, the social sciences, and contemporary art. Since 2023, she has been an active member of the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art in Poland and coordinator of its Kraków chapter.