About the work
This BA diploma was developed within the Painting and New Media program at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. The main written and practical part grew out of the Third Painting Studio under the supervision of Wojciech Łazarczyk and Jakub Czyszczoń. The written thesis itself moves through formal questions of diploma writing, definitions of symbol, allegory, and iconography, examples of the herring in culture, examples of the soldier in culture, and finally the relation between the two.
What the thesis ultimately tests is not only the symbolic relation between herring and soldier, but also the borders of artistic legitimacy. In the text, the question becomes: can such a relation sustain a diploma at all? That tension with academic form is not a flaw of the project — it is one of its real subjects.
What the project addresses
The herring appears here as a figure embedded in language, economy, folklore, ritual, and collective memory. The soldier appears as a figure of structure, discipline, conflict, representation, and institutional power. By setting them side by side, the project does not seek a literal connection. It reveals instead how culture constantly constructs meaning between things that at first seem incompatible.
The work therefore becomes more than a thematic curiosity. It asks what qualifies as a legitimate subject for art, who sets the limits of seriousness, and whether intuition, dream logic, and symbolic thinking can still carry intellectual force within an academic frame.
Parallel work — audiovisual annex
Alongside the main diploma and the practical works developed within Painting, a second work was realized as an audiovisual and performative annex under the supervision of Kamil Kuskowski and Dariusz Fodczuk. This parallel part took the form of a video titled “How to Make a Diploma”, shown within the same exhibition context.
The film was built around a deceptively simple question: how do you make a diploma? Later, the question sharpened into a more specific version: how do you make a diploma under Kuskowski? Anonymous participants, deliberately blurred, responded with practical advice, irony, doubt, and increasingly speculative proposals. The material moved between technical discipline and absurd imagination, exposing how a diploma is shaped not only by the artist, but also by projection, expectation, fear, and institutional myth.
In the recording, I remain physically present but silent — turned away from the camera, listening. This gesture matters. It shifts the role of the artist away from clear declaration and toward reception. Instead of presenting a finished statement, the work becomes a field of voices. The blurred speakers generate possibilities, stereotypes, anxieties, and fantasies, while the silent figure of the artist receives them without immediate correction.
The transcript makes this especially visible. Among the proposals were ideas such as “The Flag of Polish Earth”, national dishes preserved in resin, a Big Brother-like surveillance structure, a coin carrying my image, or a warning sign at the Polish-German border reading “Attention: Poles”. The responses also included advice about overthinking, research, technical precision, dealing with perfectionism, and the atmosphere around Kuskowski’s demanding corrections. In this sense, the video is not only about possible artworks; it is also about the social production of artistic authority.
- “The Flag of Polish Earth” — a flag materially covered in Polish soil.
- National dishes in resin — food transformed into blocked, untouchable objects.
- A Big Brother-like structure — surveillance as artistic and institutional metaphor.
- A coin with the artist’s image — value, exchange, ego, and symbolic authority.
- “Attention: Poles” — a border sign built from stereotype, warning, and dark humor.
Taken together, the written thesis and the film no longer appear as two unrelated components. They form a single diploma split across two methods: one analytical and symbolic, the other social, performative, and process-based. The diploma becomes not just a work about relation, but a work about how sense in art is collectively produced.
Why it still matters
This project remains important in my practice because it established something foundational: a willingness to follow a difficult or seemingly irrational image until it reveals its internal structure. It showed me that provocation can become method, and that humor, symbolism, intuition, research, and self-reflection do not exclude one another.
Looking back now, the diploma reads more clearly as a work built across two studio systems. That realization makes the project stronger, not messier. It reveals that the real subject was never only the herring or the soldier, but the unstable process through which an artwork, a diploma, and an artistic position come into being.
