We offer accommodation in a residency apartment located on the premises of CSW Kronika, in the heart of Bytom. The location is ideal not only for exploring the city but also for observing Kronika’s work and becoming involved in its ongoing processes. The residency can last from a few days to several weeks, depending on individual arrangements. The Kronika team provides organizational and substantive support. All other costs (meals, materials, transportation, etc.) are covered by the resident.

Please send your residency project proposal along with your portfolio to the email address: mail@kronika.org.pl. We look forward to collaborating with you!

Born in 1989 in Warsaw, where she also lives and works. Milena Soporowska is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, art historian, and curator whose research focuses, among other things, on the intersection of everyday life and popular culture with broadly understood magic and the occult, as well as on various contexts of art therapy. Her study visit was a continuation of the long-term series “Swarliwa,” in which Soporowska examines ways of commemorating so-called witch hunts in the public sphere. It involved local research, with the monument to Katarzyna Włodyczkowa, the so-called Witch of Czeladź, serving as the starting point. Based on this research, the work "Swarliwa vol. II" presented an alternative vision of commemorating Katarzyna’s story. It was presented at the exhibition “The Queen’s Breasts Carved from Wood.”

Born in 1979 in Chorzów. Lives and works in London. In her artistic practice, Katarzyna Perlak explores the tensions and dialogues between Catholic aesthetics, a queer perspective, and craft and folk traditions. Over the past few years, she has been developing the concept of “tender craft,” which refers to an investigation of how traditional craftsmanship (heritage and traditions) can be reappropriated and reimagined within contemporary feminist, queer, and diasporic (migrant) frameworks. Her residency at Kronika was dedicated to creating work for the exhibition “The Queen’s Breasts Carved from Wood.” The starting point for the installation “Revelation in the Bushes” was research Perlak conducted in Catania, Sicily, tracing the traces and iconography of St. Agatha. At the same time, she explored the phenomenon of local roadside and backyard shrines. In the work created for the exhibition at CSW Kronika, she drew on materials found in various local contexts, which together form a multilayered fabric in which the past, memory, and intimacy intertwine into a new narrative.

Visual artist and filmmaker of Romani descent. Creator of the works “Z-10889,” “Gypsyflowers,” and “Dialogue with Carmen” as part of the international exhibition “HateFree?” presented in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland (2017–2018). She lives and works in Germany, where she runs the film production company haymatfilm.

The artist’s residency in Bytom culminated in four conversations presented as video works. The protagonists are three Romani women, residents of Bytom: Angela, Żaneta, and Danuta, as well as Lidija herself. The work inaugurates a long-term process of creating a museum of Romani women; the protagonists answered the artist’s questions about fundamental values, their vision of happiness, needs, and dreams. For Lidija Mirković, it is of utmost importance that Romani women be seen and heard. The works created during the residency, along with other works by Lidija Mirković, were presented at the exhibition Shout, Sister, Shout!

From 2012 to 2015, CSW Kronika ran an international residency program in collaboration with the Kraków-based Imago Mundi Foundation, as part of the Metropolis Project dedicated to creating a contemporary portrait of Upper Silesia and the Zagłębie region. The project sparked a discussion among visual and sound artists who treat art as a cognitive tool rather than a mean of fulfilling preconceived notions or creating a wish-fulfilling image. The aim of the project was to discover parallel, coexisting realities: cities within a city, regions within a region.