Between Bridges is pleased to host an exhibition by Warsaw-based artist Karol Radziszewski. Challenging predominant historical narratives and their prevalent modes of representation, Radziszewski’s multidisciplinary and archive-based practice convenes a myriad of political, social, religio-cultural and art-historical references, probing their relation to the history of sexuality and the construction of gender. The exhibition presents an array of newly conceived works, extended series, and an extensive public programme. All of these highlight Radziszewski’s idiosyncratic methodology of assembling and sharing historically marginalised queer practices across Central and Eastern European countries, as well as his current preoccupation with portrait painting that looks beyond dominant modes of representation.

Continuing his ongoing investigations into the normative logics and politics of (art) institutions, for One Day These Kids…, Radziszewski has conceived an expansive site-specific installation that alludes to a conventional 1990s Polish classroom and its habitual visual language; it is a space that reiterates a queerness-excluding historiography and a conception of nation-state-based cultural heritage. Echoing and yet eschewing these traditions, Radziszewski employs the exhibition space to speculate on alternative pedagogical models that might have or could be centered around underrepresented or repudiated queer histories, desires and bonds.

The installation simultaneously serves as a stage for the exhibition’s public programme, conceived as integral part of the show and aligned to Radziszewski’s long-term, transnational community-building practice. Radziszewski has invited a group of his peers – artists, thinkers and activists from Eastern and Central European countries whose practices are conceptually, aesthetically and ethically connected to his own – to perform alternative “history lessons”. They include: Anatoly Belov, #FLUID (Paula Dunker and Alex Bălă), Philipp Gufler, Libuše Jarcovjáková; Ryszard Kisiel, Jaanus Samma, Anton Shebetko, Suzana Tratnik, Liliana Zeic alongside Twoja Stara. On the date of the finissage, Radziszewski will launch the latest edition of DIK Fagazine, on Ukraine, co-edited with Anton Shebetko. 


As part of the opening weekend, the first two history lessons take place on Saturday, 11 February:

6pm Ryszard Kisiel

Karol Radziszewski will be in conversation with Gdańsk based activist, archivist, and photographer Ryszard Kisiel, a leading figure for queer visibility in post-war Poland, the founder and editor of Filo (1986–1990, one of the first Polish LGBT magazines), and author of the never-published underground cruising site atlas Polish Gay Guide on the Europeans Socialists Countries. Together, they present and speak about two films by Radziszewski: Kisieland (2012), a documentary on Kisiel’s activism and his archiving of queer life, merged with the reenactment of one of his photoshoots of queer expressiveness that is considered a direct reaction to the terrors of the 1980s anti-gay militia campaign Operation “Hyacinth”; and Afterimages (2018) that takes a photo film roll of Kisiel’s archive as a starting point to reflect on gay life during the late Polish People’s Republic. 

8pm #FLUID (Paula Dunker and Alex Bălă)

“#FLUID presents a noisy political stand up tragedy, a musical linguistic poetical herstory class about blurry/ muted queer life in Romania. The archive of private narratives defining a political system that marks the limits, frictions and heavy beats of existence only within a safe space. It is a singing herstory, from dusty documents and pieces of memories of the witnesses exposed to the control of everyday life. Paradoxes of invisibility, perfectly harmonized with a disturbing noise. How does it sound?”

For further information and the schedule of the history lessons, please visit the exhibition's site: https://www.betweenbridges.net/exhibition-space/theses-on-hope/10-karol-radziszewski