Kai Wasikowski grew up on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country in a family of photographers with Polish, British and German heritage. With both parents working with cameras—including a father who was a landscape photographer—photography became an inheritance and a way of understanding the world. His practice asks how certain images come to seem natural or inevitable, and what histories and material relations they obscure.
Working across photography, installation and sculpture, Wasikowski examines how cameras shape relationships between people and land, particularly through landscape photography, conservation and settler occupation. He uses analogue and digital photography, archival research, 3D scanning and alternative processes. Recent work turns from images toward apparatus: lenses, shutters and systems for organising vision.
Wasikowski holds an MFA in Photography from RISD (2023) and a BVA (First Class Honours and University Medal) from the University of Sydney (2016). He has exhibited at Fondazione MAST, Artspace, HOTA Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Antenna Space and PhotoAccess. His work is held by Fondazione MAST, HOTA, Antenna Space, Artbank and Deloitte Australia. He has received Creative Australia’s Marten Bequest Scholarship for Sculpture (2021), the American Australian Association’s AusArt Scholarship (2020) and the Dr Harold Schenberg Art Fellowship (2017).