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. Yet monstrosity, even when exploited or suppressed, is an ineradicable part of the world. For what is tamed, normalised, and ordered tends to resurface in new and unexpected forms — as a gleaming growth on the seemingly ordered corpus of society.
For what is tamed, normalised, and ordered tends to resurface in new and unexpected forms — as a gleaming growth on the seemingly ordered corpus of society.
The exhibition Dark Paradise: Inner Tales at BWA Wrocław Główny gallery exemplifies precisely these forms. Curated by Magdalena Lazar and Katarzyna Oczkowska, it brings together contemporary artists spanning a range of mediums, from painting, photography, video, and sculpture to installation and performance. The gallery is transformed into a shadowed garden, an entanglement of wonder and dread, inviting visitors to traverse its uncanny recesses, along the way marvelling at form and confronting revulsion.
The Monster as a Mirror
Conceived as a contemporary dark fairy tale, the exhibition 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. The presented 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.
Across successive epochs, from antiquity to the present, monstrosity has been present within the ludic, the educational, the philosophical, the entertaining, and the medical. The exhibition revisits this long history while asking how monstrosity functions today, at a moment when categories of identity, visibility, and belonging are increasingly contested.
A Garden of Wonder and Unease
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, it takes the form of a shadowed garden, beckoning visitors 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. Works by artists including Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk, Martyna Czech, Nils Alix-Tabeling, Agata Słowak, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Ilona Szwarc, and Angelika Puff explore different dimensions of corporeality, sexuality, transformation, and display. Sound, sculpture, photography, painting, and installation become tools for examining the fragile border between attraction and repulsion, intimacy and estrangement.
True to the declaration embedded in its title, it takes the form of a shadowed garden, beckoning visitors to traverse its uncanny recesses, explore its curiosities, marvel at form, and confront feelings of revulsion.
The exhibition doesn’t offer a single definition of monstrosity – it presents it as a shifting and ambiguous category. The monster appears not as an anomaly outside society, but as a figure that reveals its hidden structures and embedded contradictions.
Written by Katarzyna Oczkowska and Magdalena Lazar
Dark Paradise: Inner Tales
24.04–6.09.2026
BWA Wrocław Główny gallery
ul. Piłsudskiego 105
