Pride and Prejudice: New Practices of Dignity

Peripherality, contempt, exclusion and apotheosis of bad taste. Contemprary antagonisms are fueled by the politics of shame and the politics of dignity – a system of practices based on resentment and an attempt to aggressively reinforce one's self-esteem.

On one hand, our phantasms of marginalized and excluded groups, and their symbolic position in the sphere of society and culture, are often objects of fear and derision for the privileged, yet they also result in violent aesthetic appropriations in the postmodernist pop-culture and discourse.

Can we imagine a new type of identity politics that would trigger a different register of emotions and have an emancipatory function? As part of our September edition of the Department of Presence, we host artistic and performative interventions, debates and concerts problematizing tensions associated with the codes of class, racial and sexual identification.

The 'plot' and dramaturgy of the (non)exhibition Pride and Prejudice: New Practices of Dignity takes place over a period of four weeks in four stages. Each chapter will have a separate spatial manifestation and a performative intervention prepared specially by each of five invited artists. Anna Niesterowicz focuses on the problem of hate speech. SAGG NAPOLI, is an Italian artist who advocates the aesthetics and the politics of the South. Mikołaj Sobczak deals with the widely-understood exclusion in relation to politics of memory and the drag queen movement. Finally, Wojciech Puś together with a group of performers defines new fields of queer abstraction, an inclusive community based upon a sensual practice of time and space.

Invited guests: Anna Niesterowicz, Agata Pyzik, Jakub Wencel, Magda Szcześniak, Marek Beylin, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mira Marcinów, Nicholas Grafia, Olga Byrska, SAGG Napoli, Wojciech Puś and Endless