Dark Paradise: Inner Tales

Dark Paradise is a tale woven around monstrosity — an ambiguous and multivalent category. BWA Wrocław Main Gallery is transformed into a shadowed garden, an entanglement of wonder and dread inviting visitors to traverse its uncanny recesses, along the way marveling at form and confronting revulsion. 

The curators of the upcoming exhibition at BWA Wrocław Main Gallery — Magdalena Lazar and Katarzyna Oczkowska — conceive of it as a contemporary dark fairy tale. Dark Paradise: Inner Tales focuses on the body and its secretions: on a corporeality that eludes disciplinary strategies of representation, and on identities that exceed the normative order of visibility. Monsters and hybrids have both fascinated and terrified across the centuries. They have been cast as omens and prophecies, and used as fodder for analysis. They have been put on display or hidden from sight. Across successive epochs, from antiquity to the present, monstrosity has been present within the ludic, the educational, the philosophical, the entertaining, and the medical. Yet monstrosity, even when exploited or suppressed, is an ineradicable part of the world. For what is tamed, normalized, and ordered tends to resurface in new and unexpected forms— as a gleaming growth on the seemingly ordered corpus of society. It is precisely these forms that Dark Paradise — an exhibition proposed by the curators through BWA Wrocław’s open call — exemplifies. 

Dark Paradise presents works by contemporary artists spanning a range of mediums, from painting, photography, video, and sculpture, to installation and performance. This spectrum of creative practices allows for an examination of monstrosity and the paradoxical beauty of what is rejected, untamed, and frequently deemed undesirable. In this context, monsters, given voice, tell us something not only about their nature, but about our own. For monstrosity lurks not in what deviates from so-called norms, but in what we refuse to accept in ourselves. 

The exhibition’s scenography is conceived as a glistening theatrical space in which wonder and dread intertwine. True to the declaration embedded in its title, the exhibition takes the form of a shadowed garden beckoning visitors, inviting them to traverse its uncanny recesses, explore its curiosities, marvel at form, and confront feelings of revulsion. Audiences will navigate an exhibition divided into four acts, each confronting facets of monstrosity. They will encounter works that map the category of monstrosity and its modes of display, by Wojciech IreneuszSobczyk, Martyna Czech, and Nils Alix-Tabeling. In a subdued space, they will experience a sound installation by Marianna Rodziewicz. Further into the exhibition, Wojciech IreneuszSobczyk’s Garden of Delights awaits, alongside a floral installation by Marek Wodzisławski, paintings by Agata Słowak, and a new installation by Magdalena Lazar. Body, corporeality, and sexuality surface in photographs by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Ilona Szwarc, and in the painting and performance of Angelika Puff. Along the way, we present ceramic works by Natalia Kopytko, three mirrors by Joanna Sitarz, an installation by Natália Sýkorová, and works by Joanna Wierzbicka and, at the culmination of this journey through the “dark paradise,” Marek Wodzisławski. 

Performance by Angelika Puff 

During the exhibition opening, Angelika Puff will perform. The project’s point of departure is Rapunzel with her long hair — a symbol of romanticized innocence and female submission, patterns fed to girls from an early age. In this action, hair is stripped of its beauty and left to provoke unease and revulsion. 

Co-financed by the Minister for Culture and National Heritage from the Cultural Promotion Fund — state special purpose fund.