Raise the Curtain! – Art Scene of the BNP Paribas New Horizons International Film Festival 

The BWA Wrocław Galleries of Contemporary Art are collaborating for the 16th time with the BNP Paribas New Horizons International Film Festival, exploring various themes featured in this year’s edition. Raise the Curtain! is a continuation of the festival’s Creatures of the Night film section, which is focused this year on the club scene in the UK. The exhibition presents British nightlife over the last fifty years in the form of a collage of impulses, personal manifestos, and observed moods. Archival materials are interspersed with artistic “docu-fantasias”^[1]. The exhibition presents practices and gestures that eventually paved the way for a departure from British conservatism: from the Margaret Thatcher era to Brexit.

Masquerade, the grotesque, irreverent humor bordering on vulgarity, and bold eroticism serve a purpose that goes beyond light-hearted fun and entertainment—they’re also means of regaining power and creating a sense of belonging. As devices used to question the established order, they have become part of the repertoire of subversive practices commonly found in emancipatory discourses. After nightfall, time flows differently, daytime norms are suspended, and the body becomes a medium for free expression. The night is a stage that allows for experimentation with one’s own identity, appearance, movement, behavior, and even gender. 

The exhibited works explore various forms of nightlife in the context of British culture—from burlesque and raves to the contemporary club scene. In documentary accounts, formal experiments, and found footage video clips, the artists present nightlife as an escape from reality. For several generations of British people, club culture also became a catalyst for personal and social change. 

The exhibition’s design is inspired by the architecture and atmosphere of nightclubs. Wandering through this dimly lit space, visitors encounter various fragments of a narrative—successive acts of a nocturnal drama captured in the visual art and films on display. 

We begin just before the curtain rises and the show begins. In the works of Charles Atlas and Martine Thoquenne, we see preparations for going out: changing clothes, putting on makeup, creating alternative versions of oneself. We catch a glimpse of one of the most charismatic figures of London’s underground culture: the performer Leigh Bowery, right at the symbolic moment of stepping outside the boundaries set by “everyday” social conventions. Regardless of where we end up—at a post-punk party in an abandoned warehouse, an illegal rave in a hangar, or an avant-garde performance in a shabby flat—dance, movement, and music will take center stage. We can see this in Mark Leckey’s legendary video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, in Evan Ifekoyi’s work that focuses on perspectives from black and queer communities, and in Maria Joranko’s installation, co-created by DJs from Wrocław. And then we will end the night at an afterparty: Blissful Crash, an installation with a video game created by Marcin Gawin. 

^[1] A “docu-fantasia” is a documentary film that serves as a personal record of one’s own inner world. On the borderline between facts and subjective memories, this type of film filters events through emotions and reimagines how something could have turned out differently. The genre was invented by Guy Maddin.

Raise the Curtain! exhibition is a part of the Art Scene of the 25th BNP Paribas New Horizons International Film Festival.

Raise the Curtain! exhibition is supported by the British Council under the UK/Poland Season 2025.