Bio
Born in 1985 in Katowice and raised in Chrzanów, Marta Stanisława Sala has lived and worked in Berlin since 2016. After fifteen Cracovian years (2000-2015), she maintains close contacts with Cracow, where she has learned painting with Leszek Misiak at the Academy of Fine Arts and later was trained as a tailor.
2017 – 2020, thanks to a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship, Sala made and exhibited her multi- and mixed-media project “Besser nicht mitmachen” encompassing textile, video and social theories of precarity, for which she earned a MA degree in Art in context from the Berlin University of the Arts.
Since her early artistic practice, Sala has been intensively working in collaboration with groups and individuals. In Poland, together with Polish artists and activists like Cecylia Malik, several performances and happenings related to topics such as ecological concerns or sexuality have been realized i.a. with her “naked costumes.” Sala is also a close friend and long-term yet occasional collaborator with Polish photographer Irena Kalicka.
Beside her decade-long painting and textile collaging praxis, the now Berlin-based artist focuses on social and ecological issues such as precarity, inequality, diversity or sustainability. Her latest projects include literary-artistic research and exhibition “Û∞-Berlin. A creative-anarchist urban escape chronicle” (2020) with Kurdish writer Abdulkadir Musa, social art project “Arbeitspause im Görli” (Work Break at Görlitzer Park, 2021) with German artist Johanna Reichhart and further artists, Jewish remembrance culture project “Esther’s Willow” (ongoing since 2020) with her sister Katarzyna Sala and American artist Robert Yerechmiel Snidermann, visual anthropological research and installation “‘Ostgeld’ for Ghosts” (2022) and „Die Reinickendorfer Schriftzeichen“ („The Reinickendorf Characters“ at RESIart, 2022) with Cheong Kin Man from Macau.
Sala is also a costume designer and experimental videomaker.