Filipka Rutkowska explores various dimensions of otherness, weaving them into her own personal history. Moving fluidly across performance, film, theater, and literature, she addresses socially and emotionally complex topics using a light, accessible language often imbued with humor.
In her practice, Filipka brings together two key currents that have significantly shaped contemporary Polish art: critical art and queer performance. As a long-time assistant to Paweł Althamer, she understands art as a collision between the shared and the intimate—a space where queerness becomes both a strategy of escaping rigid identity and bodily limits, and a manifesto of social change. Her sensibility has also been shaped by years of collaboration with queer choreographers, film and theater directors, collectives, and the club scene.
Filipka’s works have addressed themes such as working-class background, migration, sexual life, and educational practice. She experiments freely with a range of forms: stand-up, monodrama, rap, lecture, manifesto, guided tour, interview, feuilleton, letter, installation, drawing, collage, and assemblage.
When constructing narratives, she often draws on iconic female figures—ambivalent, internally conflicted, and far from utopian ideals of emancipation. Instead, emancipation becomes a confrontation with social reality. Over the years, her work has referenced such figures as Virginia Woolf, Carrie Bradshaw, Elizabeth Taylor and Elisabeth Costello.