Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests

Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests is a choreographic exhibition, made up of the artist’s performances, both by herself and her specially invited guests, along with works by nearly twenty artists in a variety of techniques: photography, video, sound art, painting, and sculpture. The exhibition also features non-art objects, whose history, the context of their coming to exist, or onetime significance expand the world to which Ania Nowak invites the viewer.

Nowak makes consistent use of language, and sometimes its surrogates (such as repetition, looping, three- or four-word phrases), to test new opportunities for speaking about things for which we still lack the words. She is interested in enlarging fields of meanings and actively mobilizing new, emancipated narratives. Her work is an exercise in non-binary thinking and speaking, through which divisions—into object and performance, copy and original, individualism and collectivism, pain and pleasure—get blurred, offering new chances for an understanding.

The main motif of the Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests exhibition is queer grief as sorrow over the loss of rights, health, and loved ones. These experiences are common to those who will not fit the prevailing image of the world because of their (sexual) identity, background, class, or state of health, including mental health. This is a collective tale of difference, “otherness,” of life outside of the rigid straitjacket of norms, and of death, mourning, and strategies of dealing with loss. As Judith Butler writes in Frames of War: “An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.”

The exhibition’s poetic title, so characteristic of Nowak’s work in and with language, comes from Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989) by the American Gran Fury collective, who did activist work in the 1980s and 90s, in the time of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This was made up of colorful banners with images of kissing couples, mainly of the same gender. The work and its tone of defiance—along with the anger and hope—are the historical and metaphorical frame for this exhibition. In this activist work, Ania Nowak and exhibition curator Michał Grzegorzek have found a survival strategy for today, to counteract the community and proximity of indifference.

Kissing Doesn’t Kill is also the title of Ania Nowak’s newly commissioned performance, in which movement and rest, used in a subversive manner, build a tale of the power of powerlessness. The present exhibition offers two other performances by Nowak. One of them, taking place daily at various, unannounced times, is a part of Golden Gate (2022), a vanitas choreography performed by Alicja Czyczel and Natalia Oniśk with glass sculptures. Every Saturday and Sunday, in turn, Ig May Engel will recreate Untitled (2017), attempting to make a new grammar, to cast a challenge to the internal contradictions and binaries in perceiving history and (r)evolution.

Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests is an exhibition based on performativity—using its eventness, fluidity, and power. This comes out not only in the live performances, but also in the potential of the inanimate objects and encounters with the viewers. Through multilayeredness and imagination, Nowak seeks to mobilize, not just represent, complex and non-linear processes of coping with life and loss. She aims to contend with what remains inexpressible in the language as we know it.

Exhibition brochure 'Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests'

A program of performances by Ania Nowak in the exhibition space:

Golden Gate (excerpt)
featuring: Natalia Oniśk and Alicja Czyczel
daily, fluctuating hours
ca. 25 min

Kissing Doesn’t Kill
featuring: Ania Nowak
every Thursday and Friday at 6:30 pm (exept 24.08 i 7.09) and on Saturday 9.09 at w 11:30 am as part of the New Theater event Generation After. Showcase
ca. 60 min

Untitled
featuring: Ig May Engel
every Saturday and Sunday at 5:00 pm
ca. 15 min
September 3, 9 and 10 at 5:00 pm
performed by Ig May Engel (in Polish)
and Edyta Kozub (in Polish Sign Language)

Ania Nowak
and
Joan E. Biren, Tessa Boffin, A. K. Burns and L. A. Steiner, Rüzgâr Buşki, Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Tee A. Corinne, Weronika Czajka and Hanna Tur, Alicja Czyczel and Natalia Oniśk, DViJKA, Ig May Engel, Nancy Grossman, Petrit Halilaj, Kim Lee and Maldoror, Nadia Markiewicz, Jonny Negron, Itziar Okariz, Pakui Hardware, Luiz Roque, Liz Rosenfeld, Sin Wai Kin, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Justyna Stasiowska, Warsaw Lambda Association, Wojciech Weiss, Alicja Żebrowska

The works presented in the exhibition may contain content inappropriate for underage viewers, including elements of nudity or vulgar language. Admission for minors under the age of 15 is possible with the prior consent of a parent or legal guardian (statement to be downloaded from the Museum website). Before giving consent, we recommend that you familiarise yourself in advance with the exhibition.