We will not change our show
2019
Participants: Veronika Bromová (CZ), Alex Bălă + Paul Dunca/Paula Dunker = #FLUID (RO), Jan Matýsek (CZ), Ruben Montini (IT), Kateřina Olivová (CZ), Gyula Muskovics + Tamás Páll + Viktor Szeri = Phoenix (HU), Karol Radziszewski (PL), Sergey Shabohin (BY), Lilla Szász (HU) + Express Yourself
Curated by Gyula Muskovics and Martin Vaněk
Venue: House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic
The show investigates queer art in Central and Eastern Europe. The goal was not to present a long and exhausting report covering all the current aspects of the issue; the exhibition was rather an experiment that provided space for the participants’ recent interests and new ideas.
On the one hand, we were preoccupied with the use of public space and the possibilities it provides for queer self-expression thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. While some artists dig deep in the past to collect the missing fragments of history, others look into pop culture, motherhood, queer desire and the formation of identity.
Another group of works in the exhibition investigated what remains hidden from the public and happens secretly in the dark. Secrets also inform us about how much freedom we have; the blurry reality of cruising, however, is not just about hiding. An invisible act in the anonymity of a dark room is an act of knowledge production. At the same time, what happens in darkness remains incomprehensible for the outside world. The direction of exclusion thus gets reversed equally as the power relations between majority and minority.
The idea that this “darkness” has a similar political potential as “light” could be a good summary of our thoughts, organizing this exhibition. However, without romanticizing darkness we also acknowledge that it can become as hierarchic, normative, and traumatizing as the public space.