FACULTY SABBATICAL TRIENNIAL

Faculty

FACULTY SABBATICAL TRIENNIAL

Marzena Abrahamik

Associate Professor, Adjunct, Photography

marzena-abrahamik.com

Marzena Abrahamik has been teaching at SAIC since 2014. She took her sabbatical during the AY2023–24.

Marzena Abrahamik (b. Poland, raised in Greece) is visually inspired by personal histories, attachments to unachievable and necessary for survival fantasies, to further investigate communal formations and transformations, with particular attention paid to policy, gender, and labor. She works through photographic series where images are anchored in historical events. Her formal interests in lighting, color, and gesture, connect individual images into bodies of work. Her approach to structuring and conceptualizing her work has been defined by her immigration history. Abrahamik’s cultural heritage informs her practice as an artist and educator, and her biography is a motivating resource that provides insight and empathy to otherwise abstracted issues.

Education

MFA in Photography, Yale University
BA in Political Science, Loyola University

Notable Classes Taught:

Girls In Contemporary Art, Fall: 2017, 2018, Spring: 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022
Narrative Photography, Fall: 2020
Auteurs/Outsiders, Spring: 2017
Advanced Lighting Studio Spring 2021, 2023
Advanced Post Production/Fine Printing, Spring: 2019
Large Format Fall: 2017, 2019, Spring: 2021, 2022
Color Concepts & Post Production, Spring: 2015, Fall: 2020
Introduction to Photographic Image Making, Fall: 2015, 2016, Spring: 2016, 2020, 2024, 2025

Marzena Abrahamik - Constellation I & Constellation II, from the series Return

Constellation I & Constellation II, from the series Return, 2024, exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL. 60 x 50 in., acrylic frames

The Constellations radiate outwards from portraits and stories of immigration within Chicago’s Polish communities, connects to narratives of return migration back to Poland, expands into collections of photographs from my family albums, landscapes of iconic places in Poland, images of eagles, swans, and wolves, alongside archival materials. The collages combine family photographs, staged photographs, and Polish iconographies—national symbols, Catholic icons, magazine clippings, and landscape photographs made in Poland. Encased in 60x50 in acrylic frames, the images seem to float, representing fragments of Polish and American identities on cultural and familial levels.

Return is a visual research project that explores the ways in which the Polish diasporic identity continues to re-imagine itself and negotiates the racial landscape of the United States. The combination of migration, social media, interpersonal and transnational communication, continues to challenge notions of an interconnected model citizen. The project is rooted within the Polish communities in Chicago—the traditional capital of the Polish diaspora in the United States, also referred to as New Poland. I focus on ordinary cultural attachments as they present themselves within architecture, interior design and intimate relations. I look for fragments of identity expressed through iconography within public and domestic spaces, such as paintings of corn poppies, images of Pope Jan Pawel II or maps of Poland, and make photographs that operate as pivotal documents of the construction and experiences that continue to contribute to the diasporic identity and collective memory of Polish communities in the United States. The foundation of Return’s narrative reflects cultural traditions, places, individual stories of immigration/return migration, from and to Poland, and my personal experience as a Polish immigrant.