Info
A spatial video installation that takes the form of a distorted 1990s wedding hall. The video projected on the walls consists of footage from private family archives documenting Ilo’s parents’ wedding. The figures of the bride and groom have been altered using deepfake AI, with their faces replaced using FaceFusion 3.1.0, while the faces of the wedding guests have been censored with black bars over their eyes.
On the table, instead of dishes, there is a set of five monidła sourced from the virtual collections of the Leśna Podlaska Cultural Centre and the Father Mieczysław Mieszko Centre of Kurpie Culture in Kadzidło. These wedding portraits have been animated using AI technology and recite fragments of LGBTQ manifestos, including excerpts from The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto by Eme Flores and Vikky Storm, as well as a fragment of Gay Revolutionary by Michael Swift.
On both sides of the bride and groom, tables separate the viewer from the wedding guests. Placed on them are elements of tableware from which emerge individual, contemporary political statements about queer people. The main soundscape consists of wedding feast noises drawn from family archives.
By referencing a tradition from which queer people are excluded, the project highlights the issues experienced by LGBTQ people in Poland.
Ilo Sękowska-Lenart is an artist from Tarnów. In 2023, she completed a BA in Art and Design of Ceramics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, and in 2025, an MA in Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.
Ilo describes themself as an artist-acrobat, maneuvering across various techniques and modes of expression within the visual arts. Her work is primarily concerned with activism and contemporary humanities. She focuses on her immediate surroundings, creatively processing locally and translocally gathered information and impressions to produce distilled works that tell stories important to her.
Selection committee members: Agnieszka Kulazińska, Sylwester Gałuszka, Maciej Salamon, Zuzanna Jaworska, Dagmara Domagała