We are pleased to invite you to a talk organized by the Gender/Sexuality Research Group!
Aleksandra Gajowy
(University College Dublin)
The White Lady: Transhistorical Affinities in Contemporary Lesbian Art from Poland
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
1:15 PM
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room: 1.110
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Through the lens of Liliana Zeic’s (Piskorska) selected works from the project Książka Źródeł (Sourcebook, 2020-ongoing), this talk traces transhistorical affective affinities between nineteenth-century Polish lesbians and those living today. It asks how women’s and lesbian practices of self-memorialisation, portraiture, and self-portraiture, may be crucial repositories of queer knowledge which must be read between the lines, intuited, and felt. Through these bodies of knowledge, we may consider or imagine Polish lesbianism in its local forms, opening vast possibilities for thinking about lesbian genders in Poland and considering the impossibilities of retracing both the specificity and the limitations of the language surrounding Polish lesbians across history.
Who?
Aleksandra Gajowy (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD (2020) from Newcastle University (UK), which focused on queerness in Polish art since the 1970s. Her ongoing research focuses on queerness and lesbianism in Polish visual cultures since the nineteenth century, Central and Eastern European lesbian studies, and queer Jewishness in Poland. She is currently editing a special issue of The Journal of Lesbian Studies on Central and Eastern European lesbian studies and preparing a monograph on lesbian art from Poland. Her writing appeared in journals such as Third Text, Oxford Art Journal, Art History, and Art Margins.
