Books by Pawel Leszkowicz
Art in Translation , 2025
The text highlights the potential sites of influence and intersections of American queer culture/... more The text highlights the potential sites of influence and intersections of American queer culture/counterculture of the 1960s-1980s and the visual culture and art behind the Iron Curtain. The purpose is not to present a comprehensive analysis of the reception of queer Americana in the Eastern Bloc but to point out the possible moments of cultural meetings and cross-fertilization which can be inspirations for further research and non-hierarchical reflections on the East-West relationship. The words "notes" and "impulses" are intentionally included in the title to emphasize that there was not a systemic or ideologically controlled
Art and Documentation , 2024
This essay examines how countercultural performance art and its documentation in the 1970s opened... more This essay examines how countercultural performance art and its documentation in the 1970s opened up the possibility for two queer action/body artists to express an alternative vision of love in its diversity. The French-Italian lesbian artist Gina Pane and the Polish gay artist Krzysztof Jung performed same-sex love, pleasure, desire, embodiment, and suffering on both sides of the Iron Curtain in Cold War Europe. In their uniquely pioneering body art, they examined sexual identities, embodied subjectivity, personal emotions, and artistic involvement in human freedom at a time of dramatic social transformation in both Eastern and Western European contexts. I will analyze groundbreaking performances by Pane and Jung from the 1970s to look comparatively at queer art and performance of the time and also to question the way European art history is divided hierarchically into cultural centers and peripheries. Pane is a well-known
Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe, 2025
From the book by Edinburgh University Press, edited by Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali and Katharina Ga... more From the book by Edinburgh University Press, edited by Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali and Katharina Galore
Bart Staszewski Strefy, 2021
Anish Kapoor: Sculptures as an Abstract Organism in Posthuman Constellations, in: Anish Kapoor, D.Monkiewicz (ed.), Centrum Rzeźby Polskiej w Orońsku, 2022. (in Polish and English) , 2022
Among the monumental sculptures selected for Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Centre of Polish Sc... more Among the monumental sculptures selected for Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, biomorphic forms dominate. The Briton's art can be perceived as abstraction that evokes human-often female-shapes charged with sensual or openly erotic potential. In this essay, I would like to leave this latter interpretation open, while taking note of the possibility of an alternative reading of the corporeality and organicity of these works. It is precisely their organic quality that guides my reflections towards a world of posthuman nature and biology, transgressing the human perspective and emphasizing other life-forms present in nature, whether animate or not, terrestrial or not. What I am interested in, essentially, is how, being so stable, Kapoor's stone sculptures are also liquid and processual, and how they break boundaries on many levels. Let us look at the wonderful monument of pulsating life, the stone Imminence (2000, p. 118), made of onyx. The first thing that comes to mind are maternal connotations: an impregnated womb, the belly of a pregnant woman. Yet, adopting a posthumanist vantage, one can see this sculpture quite differently indeed-as a biological germinal form that grows, sprouting, trying to get out of an organic body, potentially that of a plant or animal. The possibilities of natural-world connotations here are endless. It is the limitlessness of the evoked meanings and emotions that makes this spectacular stone monument what it is.
Als der Krieg kam … Neue Beiträge zur Kunst in der Ukraine,, 2023
Bridge over Time. Contemporary Picture of the Past, 2023
in Poland in the seventies to eighties. Similarly influential were three women artists working wi... more in Poland in the seventies to eighties. Similarly influential were three women artists working with multimedia and sculpture, namely, Natalia LL, Izabella Gustowska, and Barbara Falender. From today's perspective, the approach they took in their new images of female homoeroticism and same sex erotica could be called 'queer feminist.' Selectively, similar developments in the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian art worlds are emphasised with focus on Tamás Király, El Kazovsky, Libuše Jarcovjáková, and Karel Laštovka. The research into the queer story of Central Eastern European art is still in process and the text summarises new discoveries in the field of sexual and artistic cultures behind the Iron Curtain. Let us explain briefly the geographical and political terminology that is used in this study. Due to the fact that it deals mainly with the art from the countries of the Visegrád Group, i.e., Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the term Central Eastern Europe is often applied. In appropriate contexts the name Central and Eastern Europe also appears to emphasise the entire cultural and legal territory that came under the influence of Soviet-born communism during the Cold War, and which was not the capitalist West (Murawska-Muthesius 2021, 1-30). The historical scope of the text concerns the period after World War 2 until the end of communism in 1989, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, such terms as communism, socialism, Eastern Block, but also the totalitarian system-which are commonly mentioned in the literature on the region behind the Iron Curtain-are used (Fowkes 2020, 7-13). The countries discussed here, mainly Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, are referred to as socialist countries, as this is how they identified themselves during the period. For historical reasons, the name Czechoslovakia is used, as at that time it was one country, only divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
-“Ars Homo Erotica”, in: Sexuality. Documents of Contemporary Art., ed. By Amelia Jones, Whitechapel Gallery, London, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014, , 2014
The Male Nude as a Queer Feminist Iconography in Contemporary Polish Art, in: Otherwise. Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, Manchester University Press 2015, , 2015
Piotr Piotrowski and the Queer Revision of East-Central European Art and Museology, in: After Piotr Piotrowski. Art, Democracy, Friendship, eds. Agata Jakubowska, Magdalena Radomska, Poznań: Wydawnictwo UAM, 2019, , 2019
Gender and Art History in Poland: A Story of Subversion, in: Making Art History in Europe after 1945, ed. Noemi de Haro-García, Patricia Mayayo-Bost and Jesús Carrillo-Castillo, Routledge, London and New York 2020, 2020
War and Peace, 2015
War and Peace
The exhibition about military iconography in contemporary Polish art
September 11th... more War and Peace
The exhibition about military iconography in contemporary Polish art
September 11th – October 31nd, 2015
Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland,, www.labirynt.com,
Curators: Paweł Leszkowicz, Magda Linkowska, Tomasz Kitliński
Studia Muzealne, Zeszyt 26/2021, Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu, , 2021
Zagadnienia naukoznawstwa, Tom XXXVIII Zeszyt 2, Warszawa 2001, 2001
Odmiany odmieńca. Mniejszościowe orientacje seksualne w perspektywie gender, Katowice 2002, 2002
Wysokie Obcasy, nr 11 Listopad 2017, 2017
VOGUE, Contemporary Art Bathhouse, Gdansk 2009, 2009
Teksty drugie, 4/2003, 2003
Sztuki wizualne jako nośniki ideologii, red. M.Lisiecki, Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, Toruń 2009, 2009
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Books by Pawel Leszkowicz
The exhibition about military iconography in contemporary Polish art
September 11th – October 31nd, 2015
Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland,, www.labirynt.com,
Curators: Paweł Leszkowicz, Magda Linkowska, Tomasz Kitliński
The exhibition about military iconography in contemporary Polish art
September 11th – October 31nd, 2015
Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland,, www.labirynt.com,
Curators: Paweł Leszkowicz, Magda Linkowska, Tomasz Kitliński