"Utopias of the Present" at Krupa Art Foundation

“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”

— José Esteban Muñoz¹

The joint exhibition by Maciej Nowacki and Jaanus Samma presents a selection of works created over the past few years. The artists work across various media, united by their engagement with dominant visual codes, which they deconstruct and radically reinterpret. They weave themes of queer intimacy into their practice and symbolically rewrite grand narratives, introducing identities that have always existed but have often been overlooked.

The gesture of including non-heteronormative microhistories is not merely a fantasy. The subjectivity of individuals marginalized or deemed incompatible with dominant visions of reality was, until recently, either invalidated or sidelined. The selected works of both artists serve as a reminder of the long—and in many cases still ongoing—struggle for visibility and the right to exist.

Utopias of the Present invites reflection on the potential of communities that emerge in defiance of social norms and exclusionary policies. In times of intensifying conservative narratives, the exhibition becomes a space that proposes not only the imagining of alternative worlds but also the daily practice of solidarity and resistance.

Photos by Alicja Kielan