Most of us have been there at one point or another: sitting upright in a classroom, staring at the horizon from a blackboard in an attempt to follow a history lesson. Artist, archivist and activist Karol Radziszewski evokes this feeling with “One Day These Kids”. Accompanied by a series of lectures, this performative exhibition marks another chapter in the artist’s engagement with the queer archives of Central and Eastern Europe. The show’s title alludes to David Wojnarowicz’s photostat Untitled (One day this kid . . .), 1990, in which the artist reflects on past experiences of homophobic violence and discrimination. Radziszewski’s exhibition is structured around the central installation The classroom, 2023, which was assembled from fourteen school desks from the late 1990s that the artist sourced in Poland. Beneath the desks are wads of assorted antique chewing gum, on their surfaces pencil drawings, articles and collages exploring queer desires and historiographies. along the walls, The Portrait Gallery, 2020—, features personalities whose queerness has been erased from their biography: among them, the Ukrainian writer and feminist Olha Kobylianska (1863-1942); Armenian director and artist Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990); and Polish physicist and transgender activist Ewa Hołuszko. The pedagogical visual grammar of the space is complemented by the green cast concrete floor and neon lights that Between the Bridges founder, Wolfgang Tillmans, brought from London to Berlin.
Mobilizing the power structures of the classroom, Radziszewski draws our attention to the lessons untaught, unlearned, unallowed, both when he was a student and today. It plays with the embodied tension between the memory of a disciplinary regime and the fundamental need for open and unapologetic access to knowledge, between the repressed history of sexuality and an affirmative construction of gender.
