On 7 August 2020 in Warsaw, the police arrested Margot—the activist Małgorzata Szutowicz. The action by the police sparked a protest, which ended in the arrest of 47 people. Karol Radziszewski, whose art documents the past and present of non-heteronormative people, captures this moment in a dramatic, expressive scene styled on paintings by Pablo Picasso. He thus builds the myth of this event while stimulating reflection on its myth-making potential and the ways of shaping the memory of a grassroots liberation movement.

In the summer of 2020, the LGBTQIA+ community in Poland became the target of a hate campaign of propaganda by the state and radical right-wing circles. Part of the campaign was “homophobe buses,” trucks hired by a “pro-life” foundation to drive around the streets of Polish cities displaying slogans equating homosexuality with pedophilia. Margot and two activists from the Stop Nonsense collective blocked one of these vehicles. On 7 August 2020, in response to reports of plans to arrest Margot, a spontaneous protest broke out but was brutally suppressed by the police. This event became another flash point of social conflict. Radziszewski took up this theme in his painting.

The artist, who had previously explored the history of sexual minorities in his work, was writing history here as it was unfolding, creating an iconography of a moment being etched into the collective memory before his eyes. In the painting, the twisting, dynamic bodies of the people involved in the incident struggle with the police against the background of the Church of the Holy Cross and the statue of Copernicus. A participant tries to stop a police car by lying on its hood. The artist captured and collected into one image many scenes and snapshots circulating that day in the media and on social networks.

As activist and writer Maja Heban wrote of this event, the culmination of a two-year-long witch-hunt against non-heteronormative people was, for the LGBTQIA+ community, both a demonstration of faith in their own power and a source of collective trauma. Margot’s detention, also known as the “Rainbow Night” and the “Polish Stonewall,” was a day of collective resistance and the culmination of oppression. It was also a moment when, thanks to Margot, the previously undiscussed topic of the non-binary—a gender identity that is not clearly male or female—resonated in the mainstream media.

(J.G.)