Info

Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź
Faculty of Visual Arts
Major: Artistic Education in the Field of Fine Arts
Specialization: Photography and Multimedia
Studio of Multimedia
Supervisor: PhD Łukasz Ogórek

The starting point for the video installation was the artist’s early school experience of attending a swimming sports club. It was related to his first entry into a binary male group, a collective experience of boyhood. The artist worked on the project with a group of boys, who shared an experience of that pool, belonged to the club, or experienced its space during mandatory PE classes.

Over several months of rehearsals in a ballet room, they worked with their bodies, consciousness, expression, archive, collective memory, and own vocal and movement practice. The work is a documentation of a single performance, which is a reversed reenactment of archival events, a queer reconstruction, interacting with the systemic architecture of the pool. The point of the action is to consciously analyze the disciplining mechanisms of power, to work through them. By repeating in a new way, in a new context, reinterpreting history, and performing an operation on it, he makes a gesture of reversing the weapon pointed at us, where punishment is no longer oppressive but becomes a tool with new potential. The reward, despite its sentiment, no longer has its causative power.

Jakub Stępień – his artistic practice is based on realizing interdisciplinary projects of performative nature, using various media and materials, often recycled. He also works with sound and experimental music – performs and records under the name Apkvp. He made his debut in the ShowOFF Section at the Kraków Photomonth in 2018. Co-founder of the collective Kunszt Group. Graduate of the Kem School program, undergraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódz, and the Studium of the Academy of Photography in Krakow. He lives and works in Warsaw, where he studies Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts.