黑料不打烊

Kissing Doesn鈥檛 Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests is a choreographic exhibition, made up of the artist鈥檚 performances, both by herself and her specially invited guests, along with works by nearly twenty artists in a variety of techniques: photography, video, sound art, painting, and sculpture. The exhibition also features non-art objects, whose history, the context of their coming to exist, or onetime significance expand the world to which Ania Nowak invites the viewer.

Nowak makes consistent use of language, and sometimes its surrogates (such as repetition, looping, three- or four-word phrases), to test new opportunities for speaking about things for which we still lack the words. She is interested in enlarging fields of meanings and actively mobilizing new, emancipated narratives. Her work is an exercise in non-binary thinking and speaking, through which divisions鈥攊nto object and performance, copy and original, individualism and collectivism, pain and pleasure鈥攇et blurred, offering new chances for an understanding.

The main motif of the Kissing Doesn鈥檛 Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests exhibition is queer grief as sorrow over the loss of rights, health, and loved ones. These experiences are common to those who will not fit the prevailing image of the world because of their (sexual) identity, background, class, or state of health, including mental health. This is a collective tale of difference, 鈥渙therness,鈥� of life outside of the rigid straitjacket of norms, and of death, mourning, and strategies of dealing with loss. As Judith Butler writes in Frames of War: 鈥淎n ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.鈥�

The exhibition鈥檚 poetic title, so characteristic of Nowak鈥檚 work in and with language, comes from Kissing Doesn鈥檛 Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989) by the American Gran Fury collective, who did activist work in the 1980s and 90s, in the time of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This was made up of colorful banners with images of kissing couples, mainly of the same gender. The work and its tone of defiance鈥攁long with the anger and hope鈥攁re the historical and metaphorical frame for this exhibition. In this activist work, Ania Nowak and exhibition curator Micha艂 Grzegorzek have found a survival strategy for today, to counteract the community and proximity of indifference.