Room of Projected Horizons is the first institutional solo exhibition of Bożna Wydrowska, a performer, dancer, visual artist and initiator of the “Ball at Bożena’s” series of events. It consists of a video installation created together with a dozen or so members of the Kiki House of Sarmata. In the black-and-white video, Bożna looks at the ballroom culture from a personal perspective, as well as from the perspective of the people who are its co-creators in Poland.

Voguing and club culture are associated with extravagance, glitter and colourful appearance. Bożna strips her characters of their make-up and costumes. She shows them sautéed – delicate, sensitive, almost naked. Although they have different origins, body colours and shapes, orientations and identities, they share a passion for ballroom and the experience of exclusion in a heteronormative and transphobic society. Bożna tells her own story through conversations and intimate questions asked of the members of a queer family. Recurring themes include the body, desires, (in)ability, loneliness, ending, rebirth and love for oneself and others.

The Ballroom is shown as a tool for self-therapy, self-discovery, change and growing up. It is a place where new role-models are sought – a new mother and a new father. It allows for the recovery of autonomous space, in the geographical sense as a place in the urban fabric, but above all as a social and identity space. What Judith Butler called the performativity of gender is clearly visible in the ballroom. According to the researcher, gender is a socio-cultural construct. It is performed through repetitive gestures, patterns of behaviour, dress or social roles. Ballroom culture exposes its conventionality. It allows for the reinterpretation and questioning of the acquired patterns. In this sense, dance becomes a choreographic form of resistance against the existing socio-political order. Room of Projected Horizons heralds the beginning of a new era: the crisis of cultural gender and the arrival of new, fluid identities.

Curators: Michalina Sablik, Kaja Werbanowska