Bio
PL/DK
b. 1986
she/her
Vala T. Foltyn is performance and installation artist, queer witch, art researcher, founder of Lamella the house of queer arts, born in Poland, currently lives and works in Copenhagen.
Primarily a performance artist; she received training from "Performers House" in Silkeborg (DK), a dance education led by Alyssa Joy Stith. She also studied performance with Shahar Dor at "Artness - Home and School for Movement” in a Kibbutz Ein Shemer, north from Tel Aviv. She gained her first masters in cultural anthropology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków with interest in anthropology of dance and embodiment. During her masters she traveled to San Francisco and studied with Anna Halprin at the Mountain Studio, which evolved into a long term research on her choreographic legacy.
Foltyn also lived in Slovenia and worked with Ljubljana based art collective Kud Ljud, she toured with their projects for couple of years, mainly focusing on art in public spaces (Seoul Gwacheon Festival in South Korea, Imaginarius in Portugal, Norwich & Norfolk Theatre Festival, Oerol Festival in Holland, Les Tombées de la nuit and Chalon dans la rue in France, La Strada Graz in Austria).
She developed her artistic practice by interweaving queer performance and visual thinking when she returned to Kraków (PL) in 2013. She presented her works at Zachęta Art Museum in Warsaw, Zamek Ujazdowski CSW in Warsaw, Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, MOCAK and Modern Art Museum in Warsaw. She also worked with choreographers such as Isabelle Shad, Iwona Olszowska, Magda Ptasznik, Agata Siniarska, Kaya Kołodziejczyk and Roni Katz. She developed a performance for Magda Szpecht production “Last Animals” at Theatre Łaźnia Nowa in 2017.
In 2016, she founded a collective Lamella the house of queer arts, which is a nonstationary art platform. Lamella was created as a safer space for reflecting queer identity and engaged in the process of political, cultural and sexual liberation in Kraków. She also co-curated 40th and 41st edition of Kraków Theatrical Reminiscences, one of the oldest theatre festivals in Poland.
In 2018 Foltyn ran a political campaign to become the mayor of the city of Kraków as a gender non-binary witch and femme presenting person. She registered her committee with the State Electoral Commission as VALA and organised performance intervations as her promotional strategy.
She fled Poland in 2019 due to political changes and settled in Copenhagen. In June 2022 she gained her second degree in Master of Fine Arts in Artistic Research at Malmö Art Academy developing a methodology on queering and witching the archives as a strategy of resistance and mapping the territories of violence. In 2022 she was a resident at the Art Hub Copenhagen as part of their residency program for artists.