2016:
Fear of Castration
in Minsk
W43.1
The total installation Fear of Castration is devoted to the fears of the dominant official culture and ideology, both in Poland and in Belarus; their horror of the “filth” of the LGBT subculture. The installation is full of photographs showing the interiors and detailing the space of darkrooms found in gay clubs and bars in Warsaw. In addition to the collected photographic archive, the installation is completed by the slogan A White Culture is Afraid of Looking into a Black Hole. The “black cube” is built in the “white cube” of the gallery space as a darkroom, a changing room, or a room of horrors. The installation set the specific aesthetic dialect of “black rooms” against the ruling “white” (here = official Belarusian) culture, which, according to the artist, should stop fearing the aesthetic of the margins, and in this way overcome the titular “fear of castration”.
