opening: Friday, September 18, 6:00–9:00 PM
Performance "Swastika Sandwich”: 20.09.2026, 18:00
September 18 – October 31, 2026 | Foksal Gallery
curator: Martyna Stołpiec
collaboration: Marta Orlando, Helena Wicher, Pia Achternkamp, Stefa Gosiewsk
installation: Piotr Leszczyński, Jan Jurkiewicz, Piotr Surma
The spectre of woke-fascism is haunting Europe's bathrooms!
Exhibition takes as its point of departure a space that was supposed to remain private. The bathroom, a site of cleansing, excretion, and self-regulation, becomes a projection screen for fantasies of personal and national hygiene, as well as, for the needs, rights, and bodily secretions of the community.
Drawing on Dagmar Herzog's concept of the "new fascist body," according to which contemporary fascism mobilizes people not only through fear but also through the promise of libidinal pleasure derived from domination, cruelty, and the exclusion of others, the exhibition approaches the architecture of intimacy as a machine for producing affects. Together with architect Hubert Kielan, the choreographer and performer Ania Nowak turns to the largely forgotten tradition of the public bathhouse in Polish culture in order to imagine a hypothetical space beyond division — egalitarian, un/safe, swollen with contradictory emotions and desires: relief and shame, freedom and submission, intimacy and belonging. The installation, along with the accompanying performance “Swastika Sandwich,” explores the limits of the concept of “safe space" central to emancipatory movements and identity politics.
Let’s meet in the bathroom, where the private becomes political, and where the aesthetics, slogans, and strategies of anti-establishment mobilization increasingly intermingle and resemble one another on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund – a dedicated state fund.
Media patronage: Krytyka Polityczna
English (UK) 
Polski