Karolien Chromiak

Karolien Chromiak (°1989) is a Brussels based visual artist that explores the connection between the digital and the natural. By using the techniques of glitching, gathering and storytelling she aims to disrupt the invisible, and often violent, structures that shape our environment in an attempt to finally heal our shared wounds.

In her latest ongoing project ‘going back to’, she glitches the home and the position that it entails in a patriarchal late-capitalist landscape. Between the Western European witch hunts in the middle ages to Poland that banned abortion, there have been consistent attacks on our homes, the places where we find shelter. Why is it that for minority groups the concept of home can be so traumatic? From the oppressiveness of social housing architecture, the position of privilege that organised nature in cities entails to the exclusion of queerness in the nuclear family, inequality is seen whenever we think of home.

Her multimedia practice often takes the form of mixed media installations in which natural objects and digital images form a strange, fictional environment. Her work was shown at, amongst others, SMAK Ghent (BE), MHKA Antwerp (BE), Generation Brussel (BE), Rundum Art Space, Tallinn (EE), Art Rotterdam (NL), Villa Fleming, Beirut (LB), Crosley Gallery, Florida (VS), Kunsthal Gent (BE), Pilar Brussels (BE). She was selected by an international jury to participate in the first edition of STRT Kit Residency and was the co-founder of LIIIm3 artspace. She is supported by the Flemish government and VGC.