Artist Name: Xawery Deskur
Residency Dates: October 2026
Born: 1988
Hometown: Aix-en-Provence, France
Lives & Works: Warsaw, Poland
URL: xawerydeskur.myportfolio.com | Instagram: @_drrr__xawerrrydeskurrr___
Gallery: Art Agenda Nova and The Razem Pamoja Foundation
Education:
2026 – PhD in Art, Doctoral School at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland
2020 – Documentary program, Wajda Film School, Warsaw, Poland
2019 – Screenwriting course, Wajda Film School, Warsaw, Poland
2017 – AMA film school in Krakow, Poland
2015 – MFA in Art, Faculty of Graphic Arts, Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland
Bio/Statement:
Xawery Deskur is a Polish visual artist and film director whose work moves between documentary, experimental, and essay film, alongside visual art, often returning to how identity and history get constructed — and reconstructed. His films move deliberately between registers: documentary and speculative, earnest and absurd, professionally crafted and intentionally amateur. Across these forms, Deskur returns to outsider figures — the self-mythologizer, the countercultural dreamer — and to the porous boundary between historical fact and the myths people build to survive it. His current project, Feathers of the Other, extends this inquiry into cultural appropriation and exile, examining the Indianiści — a controversial Polish subculture, rooted in a postwar fascination with Native Americans, whose members recreate and perform their ways of life.
Deskur’s documentary science-fiction film Jesteś tu? (Are You There?, 2023) explores a relationship with artificial intelligence, unfolding within a speculative AI-driven fantasy in which objects are endowed with a soul. The film premiered at the Kraków Film Festival and went on to win multiple international awards, including Best Documentary Film in the Polish-Czech competition of the Zoom Zbliżenia Festival in Jelenia Góra, a Golden Award at the Heart of Europe International TV Festival & Forum, and Best First-Time Filmmaker at the LA Art Film Fest (2025). He is an adiunkt (assistant professor) at the Akademia Sztuki w Szczecinie (Szczecin Art Academy), where he leads his own studio within the Department of Experimental Film. He holds a doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (ASP Warszawa), defended in 2026 under the supervision of dr hab. Jakub Wróblewski, and a master’s degree in graphic arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (ASP im. Jana Matejki, 2015). He trained in documentary directing and screenwriting at the Wajda School (DOK PRO, 2019–2020; SCRIPT, 2018–2019).
Support: Xawery Deskur’s residency is made possible with support from Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
