Guides: Sue Bartel and Arek Kluk, Grupa Stonewall
LGBT+ Zones. Queer Art in the Times of the Good Change
Municipal Gallery Arsenał in Poznań
May 30 – August 31, 2025
Participants: Ania Nowak, Bart Staszewski, Biblioteka Azyl, Daniel Kotowski, Daniel Rycharski, Edna Baud, Filip Kijowski, Filipka Rutkowska, Karol Radziszewski, Kacper Szalecki, KEM, Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, Liliana Zeic, Małgorzata Mycek, Mikołaj Sobczak, Olga Dziubak, Piniak Przemysław, pozqueer, Sebulec, Sergey Shabohin, Slamka, X-Philes, Queer Archives Institute.
The largest institutional review of queer art of the last decade – a voice of resistance, memory, and community
The exhibition LGBT+ Zones. Queer Art in the Times of the Good Change at the Municipal Gallery Arsenał is the first presentation of queer art in Poland on this scale since 2010.
The exhibition features works by 24 artists and collectives creating some of the most distinctive and engaged works in the Polish field of visual arts. The project focuses on the years 2015–2023 not only in the context of the Law and Justice government, which for the LGBTQIAP+ community was a time of dramatic social deterioration and numerous acts of hatred, but also of intense activism, solidarity, and cultural change. The exhibition is held in a special moment – the year in which Poland assumes the presidency of the Council of the European Union. This makes the exhibition a unique testimony not only of oppression, but above all of strength, survival, and collective resistance.
The curators – Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew and Gabi Skrzypczak, and the curator of the performative program Andrzej Pakuła – have constructed a narrative around the titular zones, which guide visitors/the audience through the complex contexts of queer creativity: from documentation of hate campaigns and forms of artistic protest, through self-organization, strategies of representation and self-advocacy, the deconstruction of national myths, to the performance of new communities and identities.