Host Kasia Bojarska invited the following three panelists to meet (online) and talk about masculinity, male body and shame in contemporary visual culture and arts.
Alexandra Hirszfeld, a philosopher working in the area of artistic and curatorial practices and the theory of new media art. She makes her own projects on the borderline of live stage installations, sound art and objects. She is the author of the book “What rules the picture? Repetition in audiovisual arts” (Universitas, 2015). Aleksandra Hirszfeld recently started a project on male sexuality in Poland. Her previous one on female sexuality was received quite well.
Paweł Leszkowicz is a scholar of art and visual culture, freelance curator specializing in Contemporary Art and LGBTQ Studies. In 2000, he defended his doctoral dissertation on Helen Chadwick. He works as a reader at the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland. He was the curator of the exhibition entitled Ars Homo Erotica (2010) exhibition at Warsaw’s National Museum. Leszkowicz is an LGBT rights activist, he took part in Poland’s lesbian and gay visibility campaigns ‘Let Them See Us’ and ‘Equal’ in Europe.
Ernst van Alphen is curator of (a.o.) SHAME! and Masculinity, currently on show till 31 January 2021 at @H401, an author and professor of literary Studies at the Department of Film and Literary Studies of the University Leiden. He recently published: The performativity of provocation: the case of Artur Zmijewski (2019), Immediacy versus hypermediacy, straight versus un-straight: staged photography as re-mediation (2019), A monument for future memory: the Ringelblum archive as classical archive (2018), Attention for distraction: Modernity, modernism and perception (2018), Visionaire beelden (2015)
Moderation by Katarzyna Bojarska, PhD, Assistant Professor Cultural Studies, SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland. Kasia Bojarska is editor of View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture academic journal. See: www.pismowidok.org and at Widok. Foundation for Visual Culture, Warsaw Poland.
Thanks to WIDOK: Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej and Krytyka Polityczna in Warsaw as part of the “Centrum Jasna” programme financed by the Capital City of Warsaw.
Image: Marlene Dumas, ‘The Making of Myths’