At this year’s NADA in New York, BWA Warszawa shows a solo presentation by Karol Radziszewski. Antoine de Paris is a project devoted to Antoni Cierplikowski, hailed as “the king of hairdressers, the hairdresser of kings.” Aside from his spectacular commercial success enjoyed in the interwar period, Antoine, just like his friend Coco Chanel, made an enormous contribution to the revolution of mores taking place at the time. It was him who created the “á la garconee” hairstyle, and it was him whose eccentric behavior, masquerades and open homosexuality transgressed social norms. If Antoine had been an American, he would have become a Hollywood movie hero a long time ago. But in our part of the world, “celebrating queerness” is still a topic to be worked through.
Karol Radziszewski is an interdisciplinary artist who uses different media: painting, film, photography, and installations. His methodology, which involves working with archives, draws on a multitude of cultural, historical, religious, social, and gender-related references. Radziszewski
has offered re-interpretations of the works of other artists, mainly from the Eastern European avantguard.
In doing so, he has focused on excerpting queer tropes or looking at them from a queer or feminist perspective. By means of appropriation art tools, he has endeavored to rewrite official history and offer his own narratives.
Both private and public experiences are important in the histories of queer communities told by Radziszewski. Childhood games, memories of a conservative background, or sexual fantasies are present in his works where they are on an equal footing with the political and social changes going on in the world. The artist’s biography can be read as one of the many experiences of growing up queer and living in Central and Eastern Europe. In both Polish and common history, gays, lesbians, trans, and queer people are still insufficiently represented. It does not mean that they had not previously existed though it is the most common choice of narrative. Radziszewski’s artistic strategy is far from any forced coming-outs, unmasking scandals, or homo-investigations. The thematic axis of his art is performative nature of queer archives which restore the memory of a past denied and which democratize history. Regardless of the tools he uses, the artist formulates new ways of understanding history, memory, and legislation. He connects facts with fantasies, combines documents with memory scraps. He misleads so as to show alternative paths of remembering. He not only reveals individual experiences but records the fate of entire communities. He also goes beyond Polish borders in doing so.
In his vast queer genealogy – initiated by the monumental work The Gallery of Portraits and developed in Antoine de Paris through the prism of Cierplikowski’s figure – Radziszewski once again asks about the politics of memory and non-memory in official narratives. He reflects on the ways of discussing queer figures without reductive admiration, without turning a blind eye to the dark pages of their ambiguous biographies. On the place of queer desire in normative stories. On approaches to writing the myth of the past without a detriment to the future. The artist’s works also refer to the performative source of myth – storytelling, shadow play, imitation and costume. Grand spectacles begin with a modest tale.
At this year’s NADA in New York, BWA Warszawa shows a solo presentation by Karol Radziszewski. Antoine de Paris is a project devoted to Antoni Cierplikowski, hailed as “the king of hairdressers, the hairdresser of kings.” Aside from his spectacular commercial success enjoyed in the interwar period, Antoine, just like his friend Coco Chanel, made an enormous contribution to the revolution of mores taking place at the time. It was him who created the “á la garconee” hairstyle, and it was him whose eccentric behavior, masquerades and open homosexuality transgressed social norms. If Antoine had been an American, he would have become a Hollywood movie hero a long time ago. But in our part of the world, “celebrating queerness” is still a topic to be worked through.
Karol Radziszewski is an interdisciplinary artist who uses different media: painting, film, photography, and installations. His methodology, which involves working with archives, draws on a multitude of cultural, historical, religious, social, and gender-related references. Radziszewski
has offered re-interpretations of the works of other artists, mainly from the Eastern European avantguard.
In doing so, he has focused on excerpting queer tropes or looking at them from a queer or feminist perspective. By means of appropriation art tools, he has endeavored to rewrite official history and offer his own narratives.
Both private and public experiences are important in the histories of queer communities told by Radziszewski. Childhood games, memories of a conservative background, or sexual fantasies are present in his works where they are on an equal footing with the political and social changes going on in the world. The artist’s biography can be read as one of the many experiences of growing up queer and living in Central and Eastern Europe. In both Polish and common history, gays, lesbians, trans, and queer people are still insufficiently represented. It does not mean that they had not previously existed though it is the most common choice of narrative. Radziszewski’s artistic strategy is far from any forced coming-outs, unmasking scandals, or homo-investigations. The thematic axis of his art is performative nature of queer archives which restore the memory of a past denied and which democratize history. Regardless of the tools he uses, the artist formulates new ways of understanding history, memory, and legislation. He connects facts with fantasies, combines documents with memory scraps. He misleads so as to show alternative paths of remembering. He not only reveals individual experiences but records the fate of entire communities. He also goes beyond Polish borders in doing so.
In his vast queer genealogy – initiated by the monumental work The Gallery of Portraits and developed in Antoine de Paris through the prism of Cierplikowski’s figure – Radziszewski once again asks about the politics of memory and non-memory in official narratives. He reflects on the ways of discussing queer figures without reductive admiration, without turning a blind eye to the dark pages of their ambiguous biographies. On the place of queer desire in normative stories. On approaches to writing the myth of the past without a detriment to the future. The artist’s works also refer to the performative source of myth – storytelling, shadow play, imitation and costume. Grand spectacles begin with a modest tale.