Karol Radziszewski – Queer Archives Institute

2. 10. 2024

Karol Radziszewski, ‘Filo’ exhibition, 2024, Installation view at Auto Italia, London

Queer Archives Institute (2015 – present) is a non-profit art and research organisation dedicated to data collection, digitisation, analysis, presentation and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. The Queer Archives Institute is a long-term project open to transnational collaboration with artists, activists and academic researchers.

“Racism is definitely linked to colonialism. I also observed it in the countries where I do my research. The fact that most societies in Central and Eastern Europe are very homogeneous, white and, like in Poland, mainly Catholic, causes fear of any otherness. The Other
is an intruder, a threat. At the same time, in the context of the queer community, we can talk about two types of colonialism. On the one hand, it is the influence of imperial Russia, its cultural appropriation of occupied countries and deeply rooted homophobia including a particular pattern of toxic masculinity. On the other hand, there is something that I call “rainbow colonisation”. It is now common for Poles interested in LGBT rights to be more familiar with the dissident struggles in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s than their own local history. My growing research into pre-1989 and even pre-WWII queer history in Central and Eastern Europe is a kind of response to that. I’m revealing and presenting this history against the Westernisation of all things LGBTQ+ post-’89.”

Image captions

1 | Karol Radziszewski, ‘Filo’ exhibition, 2024, Installation view at Auto Italia, London, UK. Photographer: Henry Mills. Courtesy of the artist
2 | Karol Radziszewski, Afterimages, 2018, film still, Courtesy of the artist
3 | Karol Radziszewski, ’The Power of Secrets’ exhibition, 2019. Installation view at CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland. Photographer: Bartosz Górka. Courtesy of the artist
4 | Karol Radziszewski, He 1980s, Courtesy of the artist

Karol Radziszewski

(*1980, Poland) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with film, painting, photography and installation. His methodology, based on archival materials, strings together cultural, historical, religious, social and gender themes. He is the publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine and the founder of the Queer Archives Institute.

#47 Make Voices Be Heard

“Let everyone be heard” is another way of putting the message of this issue tied to this year’s Fotograf Festival of the same name, the guest curators of which are Noemi Smolik and Adam Vačkář. Its motivation is to give space to voices that primarily come from the eastern part of the old continent, which, in our experience, tend to go unheard.