Overview
In 1989, a great political change awaited Poland: with the fall of the Berlin wall and the flourishing of capitalism, the people behind the Iron Curtain would be set free.
Karol Radziszewski was nine years old, living in Białystok, and, in a graph-paper notebook, he drew pages and pages of princesses in corrective eyewear, dogs with mermaid tails, and mysterious seductresses, whose exceptionally firm bosoms would be, sooner or later, bedecked in arrows shot into a heart or a flame. Karol knows that the secrets of these notebooks were off limits to everyone.
Today these drawings reemerge as self-portraits of this adult artist: full-fledged works capping off Radziszewski's enormous queer archive. For he himself is a man of many faces: artist, curator, film director, and avid collector, skillfully navigating between the visual and performative arts. But above all, he is the creator of the Queer Archives Institute, a never-ending performance and informal organization grappling with the suppressed, yet surprisingly beautiful queer memory of Central and Eastern Europe.
The artist's special montage of archival materials--self-made, ready-made, or inspiration for artistic extrapolation--formulates new ways of understanding history, memory, or legislation. He blurs facts with fantasies, cobbling together documentation from scraps of memories. He leaves false trails to suggest alternative paths of remembering.
The secret performativity of Karol Radziszewski's archive is not merely in its tales of the past, but above all, in the queer potential of the future: in its revolutionary nature, its change, and its promise of freedom.
Contributors
Michał Grzegorzek, Fanny Hauser, João Laia, Élisabeth Lebovici, Katarzyna Przyłuska-Urbanowicz, Dorota Sajewska, Barbara Steiner, Wojciech Szymański
This book title, Karol Radziszewski (The Power of Secrets), ISBN: 9783956795503, by Michal Grzegorzek, published by MIT Press (February 2, 2021) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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