Staff Profile

Dr Katarzyna Falęcka is Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art Department, School of Arts and Cultures. She specialises in modern and contemporary art from Northern Africa and its diasporas, with a particular focus on questions of archives, memory and gender.

Her first monograph Photographic Afterlives: Art, Archives and the Algerian War of Independence is currently under contract with Manchester University Press. The book explores the work of contemporary artists who engage with the photographic archives of Algerian decolonisation against the background of ongoing restitution discussions, as well as a surge in independent archiving projects in Algeria. From 2025 until 2027, Falęcka co-leads (together with Dr Przemysław Strożek from the Polish Academy of Sciences) an AHRC-funded international research project on the artistic exchanges and cultural transfers between the former Eastern Bloc and Northern Africa during the Global Cold War, 1940s-1980s.

Falęcka has published articles in journals including African Arts (2022) and Third Text (2023), contributed chapters to the Wiley Blackwell Companion to French Art (2025) and exhibition catalogues, and curated the Beyond Metaphor: Women and War exhibition at apexart in New York (2021). A recipient of fellowships at the John Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC; the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis, Tunis; the African Art Department, Free University Berlin, Berlin; and the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, Tunis, she also set up and curates the Modern Art in the Maghrib podcast series. Falęcka completed her AHRC-funded PhD at University College London under the supervision of Professor Tamar Garb and Professor Azzedine Haddour, received her MA from University of Oxford thanks to the Edgar Wind Scholarship, and completed her BA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Prospective PhD students working on modern and contemporary art, colonialism, archives, gender, memory, transregional cultural exchanges, and photography are welcome to submit a research proposal.

Art Histories I and II; Cultures and Histories of Display; Histories of Photography; Contemporary Art and Globalisation; Dissertation Supervision; Photography Forum

PhD Supervision

Paulina Michnowska, 'Tracing Memory: Clay in Relation to an Endangered Rainforest Sign Language of the Penan Hunter-Gatherers. Proposing an Aesthetic Practice as Means of Ethnographic Research', co-supervised with Professor Andrew Burton.

Youcef Hadjazi, 'Decoding Masculine Performativities: Algerian Café Culture (El Kahwa)'

Chloe Chen, 'Hybrid Bodyscape: Performing the Diasporic Self in Britain, 1980s-2000s'

• Articles

  • Falecka K. Woman as Battleground: Marc Garanger's Identity Photographs from Algeria and their Long Afterlives. Third Text 2023, 37(1), 44-60.
  • Falecka K. Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images . African Arts 2022, 55(3), 38-53.

• Book Chapter

  • Falecka K. Monika Weiss: Biography. In: Halina Gajewska, Barry Keane, ed. Monika Weiss - Nirbhaya. Orońsko: Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko Press, 2021.

• Online Publications

  • Falecka K. Houria Niati’s Visual and Sonic Evocations of Algerian Women. MoMA, New York: post: notes on art in a global context, 2025. Available at: https://post.moma.org/houria-niatis-visual-and-sonic-evocations-of-algerian-women/.
  • Falecka K. Beyond Metaphor: Women and War. New York: apexart, 2021. Available at: https://apexart.org/Beyond-Metaphor-essay-ENG.php.
  • Falecka K. “Whoever owns heritage is a temporary custodian”: an interview with Akram Zaatari. Berlin: TRAFO - Blog for Transregional Research, 2020. Available at: https://trafo.hypotheses.org/25746.

• Reviews

  • Falecka K. Photography as Relation in Africa. Art History 2022, 45(1), 207-213.
  • Falecka K. Future Imperfect. Contemporary Art Practice and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East. Journal of Arabian Studies 2017, 7(1), 119-121.