Polish multidisciplinary artist Ania Blanda creates interactive, place-based art projects that use illustration, websites and participatory formats to connect audiences with complex questions about the places they inhabit — working with organisations and communities to turn passive viewing into active engagement.
Ania Blanda makes work that asks something of the people who encounter it. Not just to look, but to respond, contribute or sit with a question that does not resolve easily. Her projects touch on divisive dilemmas: religion, the body, veganism, the human relationship with animals. The format varies. The intention does not. “The first stage of working on a new project is identifying the disconnection,” she says, “and then committing to making the new world blossom for us all.”
Much of that commitment plays out through socially engaged work developed in direct response to specific places and communities. While based in Cambridge, Blanda created projects that grew from the city’s scientific communities, its cultural institutions and the people within them. To…, developed with collaborator Maciek Bowszys, is a web-based project that invites audiences to contribute directly to the work rather than receive it. Emergent Flora, also co-created with Bowszys, operates on the same principle: the audience is not a passive recipient but a participant whose involvement shapes what the project becomes. Both projects can be explored at her website. Her work at Kettle’s Yard developed in a similar direction, responding to the institution and the communities around it.
“Research is just understanding why I am drawn to it,” she says. That description captures something important about how Blanda works: the intellectual and emotional pull toward a subject comes first, and the research is the process of understanding that pull rather than building a case from the outside. It means the work is consistently personal even when it is participatory, and consistently connected to something specific even when the themes are universal.
Blanda’s broader practice combines traditional illustration with digital composition, drawing on medieval and naïve depictions of animals and the spontaneity of scrapbooking alongside the precision of 18th-century illustration. She is interested in residencies and collaborations with art spaces that allow her to develop place-based responses connecting audiences with where they live.
Ania Blanda is a Polish multidisciplinary artist currently based in the UK.
Website: ania-blanda.com Instagram: @ania.blanda
Selected projects: To… (interactive web project, with Maciek Bowszys, ania.makemore.cloud/to_/), Emergent Flora (ania.makemore.cloud/code/), National Saturday Club mentorship, Kettle’s Yard socially engaged work, Cambridge.
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