Collection

“Kisieland” is a record of Karol Radziszewski’s meeting with Ryszard Kisiel, a representative of Poland’s homosexual underground of the 1980s, publisher of the independent uncensored zine “Filo”. The film pivots on the until then hidden archive – dozens of colour slides documenting photography sessions that Kisiel and his friends had in a private flat of one of them. The photographs aesthetically and thematically enter into an interesting dialogue with the works by Jack Smith and Nan Goldin, representatives of the New York artistic underground of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Kisiel took the photographs at the turn of 1985 and 1986 as a direct reaction to the “Hyacinth” operation of SB (Polish secret police) which consisted in collecting materials about Polish homosexuals. Kisiel was one of the victims of this operation. The film by Radziszewski is an attempt to describe the culture and underground activity of the 1980s in a different way, from the perspective of outsider and amateur art, showing the motifs ousted both by the artistic avant-garde were present and by the cultural mainstream of the People’s Republic of Poland.