The Visiting Artist’s Studio (spring 2020) was lead by Karol Radziszewski.

Karol Radziszewski is a painter, video and installation artist, photographer, researcher, curator, and publisher who will focus his pedagogical program on alternative stories and histories and creating of one’s own narrative. The presentation of archiving queer practices as a subversive tool will constitute a part of the course.

Karol Radziszewski was born in 1980 and lives and works in Warszaw. He graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warzsaw. He works with film, photography, installations, and interdisciplinary projects. His artistic approach based on archiving strategies challenge cultural, historical, religious, social, and gender boundaries. Radziszewski is a co-founding member of the Szu Szu moving gallery, editor in chief and publisher of the DIK Fagazine and a founder of the Queer Archives Institute.

Radziszewski’s work has been exhibited in The National Museum in Warszaw, The Museum of Modern Art in Warszaw, The Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warszaw, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Wien, New Museum in New York, VideoBrasil in Sao Paulo, Cobra Museum in Amsterodam and many others. He has participated in several international biennials, including PERFORMA 13 in New York, the 7th Göteborg Biennial, or the WRO Media Art Biennial in Wroclaw.

During the first year of his artistic practice, Radziszewski has worked in the medium of painting and was inspired by pop culture motives. Murals or prints on textiles covering white surfaces of the images multiplied by black linear pattern constituted a typical visual motif of this period. The artist created his largest mural in the Marymont underground station in Warszaw in 2006. Since 2002, homosexuality, eroticism, and queer experience appeared in Radziszewski’s work as central motives. His art has become a part of the Polish gay culture revival whose most acclaimed manifestation was the book called Lubiewo by Michal Witkowsky. Radziszewski made the photographs illustrating the special issue of the book. The DIK Fagazine, published by Radziszewski, is also connected with the movement. In 2006, the artist received the first prize in the Samsung Art Master Award for his Plus/Minus video diary documenting difficult moments of waiting for the HIV test results.

Research and curatorial activities comprise another important sphere of the artist’s activities. Radziszewski focuses on Polish and international queer art history dating back to the 1970s. In 2006, he organized an event called “Taste It” - a competition in the most erotic way of eating bananas, clearly referencing to the work of a Polish artist Natalie LL, called Consumer Art and created in 1972. His film America Is Not Ready for This made in 2011 depicts Radziszewski’s journey to the USA which Natalie LL made 34 years before him. During this period, Radziszewski met and interviewed artists and gallerists that Natalie LL met in 1977.

Since 2009, Radziszewski has been working on a documentary called Kisieland which records the artist’s meetings with Ryszard Kisiel, the founder of Filo, the first gay zine in Central Europe. The film focuses on the previously secret part of Polish gay history – the military action called “The Hyacynth”, during which the Secret Police of the Polish Popular Republic was collecting information on homosexuals in Poland.

In 2015, Radziszewski founded Queer Archives Institue, an organization devoted to collecting and presentation of queer art focusing on Central and East Europe. The opening exhibition of QAI took place in Sao Paulo in Brazil in 2016 and at present is a part of Radziszewski’s exhibition called The Power of Secrets in the Zamek Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warszaw.

www.karolradziszewski.com