Collection

Karol Radziszewski’s film was based on interviews with gallery owners/ managers, curators, and artists with connections to the American art scene. The project was inspired by the visit to New York in the 1970s by Natalia LL, a major neo-avant-garde Polish artist. The film’s narrative uses accounts—often as not mutually contradictory—of persons recalling Natalia LL’s presence and work in the United States, and asking questions related to gender, feminist art, and conceptualism. The issue of East European artists’ presence in the global art world following the collapse of the Iron Curtain is the other essential theme of Radziszewski’s project.

Creator of films, photographs, installations, and interdisciplinary projects; painter and draughtsman. A painting graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he co-founded the art and curatorship collective Latająca galeria szu szu (with Ivo Nikič and Piotr Kopik). He is publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine. He frequently referenced popular culture in his early works, developing a recognisable comic book style: black outlines on white. He is inspired by random photographs as well as religious pictures, blending gay and erotic tropes in the resulting works. He created a series of paintings in recent years—replicas of his own childhood drawings. Apart from art, Radziszewski engages in research, dissemination, and publishing of works associated with Polish gay culture. He founded the Queer Archives Institute in 2015, an organisation with a focus on collecting and presenting art associated with the queer movement in Central & Eastern Europe. He received the Polityka Passport Award in 2009 and among other events participated in the Performa 13 Biennial in New York (2013). He lives and works in Warsaw.