ABSTRACT
Radziszewski is one of the most renowned queer Polish artists. He is also a founder of the para-institution called Queer Archives Institute, which gathers documents on the lives of excluded or living-in-secret communities, mostly from Eastern European countries. At the heart of this collection are the Ryszard Kisiel’s archives. The Donald Duck stickers also connote Western imagery, framing the understanding of AIDS in Poland as well as the desires and imageries of transition. Intentionally planned to fall one day after The Power of Secrets’ opening, visitors to Ujazdowski Castle could also attend a performance by Polish theatre director Michal Borczuch. After June 4, 1989, when the first semi-free elections were held in Poland, Dionizjusz Czubala—a Polish folklorist working in the region of Silesia—noted that people started to tell themselves frightening stories about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1992, the Warsaw gallery Appendix, located in the same building as the Academy of Fine Arts, presented Antoni Grabowski’s work entitled 5000 Elements.
