April 24 – September 6
Dark Paradise is a tale woven around monstrosity — an ambiguous and multivalent category. BWA Wrocław Główny 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.
Artists: Nils Alix-Tabeling, Martyna Czech, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Natalia Kopytko, Magdalena Lazar, Angelika Puff, Marianna Rodziewicz, Joanna Sitarz, Agata Słowak, Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk, Natália Sýkorová, Ilona Szwarc, Joanna Wierzbicka, Marek Wodzisławski
