Kissing Doesn’t Kill – Ania Nowak

KISSING DOESN’T KILL 2023

Exhibition and performance curated by Michał Grzegorzek at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.

Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Ania Nowak and Guests is a choreographic exhibition, made up of the artist’s performances, performed both by herself and 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 understood 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.

Kissing Doesn’t Kill is the title of both the exhibition as a whole and a new performance created by Nowak created especially for the show. These macro- and microscales facilitate a space in which interior and exterior, raveling and unraveling, growth and post-growth intersect. What does it mean to want all of life? Fits, ights, satisfaction, a full stomach, a multiple orgasm, a good rest, a good eternal rest?

How much of a burden can you shoulder of your own volition, and how much because you are unable to oppose it? Do you sometimes feel the urge to be crushed by a greater, overwhelming force? To stop resisting, just for a moment? To give yourself up to the pleasure of just existing, instead of producing, accumulating, and multiplying? “Playing dead” can be a survival strategy for those living under constant compulsion or in peril: the pleasure of respite, non-being, oblivion.

Ania Nowak seeks the erogenous zones of the exhibition—its folds, lips, bruises—to explore the tensions between power, visibility and communication. She works in a spectrum between loss and gain, expectation and satisfaction, grief and delight, in a chorus of the dead and the still alive.

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 presence of objects attesting to a longer cultural history created interesting friction. “Stones of disgrace” and “masks of shame,” sixteenth-century objects used as devices of torture and humiliation for women, were loaned by a local history museum. These were now shown as sculpture alongside rocks thrown through the Warsaw headquarters of Lambda. Another highlight was an appealing wood carving by Turkish artist Rüzgâr Buşki (How I realised that the agony and the bliss both belong to the universe as I was transitioning interspecies to save myself from the misery of the humankind, 2019); this also functioned as a bench for viewers and as a platform for performances. The overall installation looked terrific […]
Claire Bishop, Artforum

Her [Nowak’s] action is as simple as it is apt. In the eponymous performance Kiss Doesn’t Kill, the artist abandons the verbal message. She seeks non-canonical, non-hierarchical languages, ones that do not put clear boundaries between ‘I’ and ‘you’, ‘me’ and ‘it’. She enters into close relationships with the works in the exhibition by stroking a television, rimming a sculpture, kissing a wall, and rubbing up against people in the audience. Through each action, she strikes a new chord of being together in the museum space; in that mutual, bodily closeness of which we are suddenly aware, and which turns out not always to be comfortable, but certainly somehow exciting. Although the artist’s expression is mostly limited to medium-articulated sounds and the singing of cringy summer hits such as Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer and Sabrina’s Boys, Nowak manages to hold our attention for almost an hour. With the slightest smile, gesture or squint, she expresses the full complexity of what is, after all, essentially a cliché: summer in the city, and within it – the Vistula River, exposed bodies, lustful glances, monogamy suspended for the summer heat. Nowak’s erotic choreography exposes the theatricality of sexuality, its highly interesting ritualisation and its camp, unabashedly humorous backstory
Aleksander Kmak, Magazyn Szum

Looking at Nowak’s actions, I once again return to the distinction that imposed itself on me when I first encountered the exhibition. The artist’s practice is political, but not like a rainbow flag, rather like a buttock sticking out of the tulle pants of a costume: somewhat ridiculous, but also sensual and political. Even if it remains outside the logic of authenticity, this exposure requires courage, confronting the risk of sexualization, and is an attempt at articulation on its own terms. At the same time, I don’t think that combining these different activist aesthetics – the literal ones, referring to rainbow symbolism, and the intimate ones, not fitting into the poster’s demands – is a stretched attempt to give a Polish context to the works of the Berlin-based artist. The physical encounter between these aesthetics also occurs at the end of her performance. Nowak sits next to an installation of “performance objects”: stones of shame from the 16th century, fossil-sandstone and contemporary paving stones. In a pleading gesture, the artist extends her hand toward the paving block, which was used to break a window at the Lambda Association headquarters a few years ago. With a mute motion, she turns to the visitors of the exhibition, finally someone realizes and hands her the stone. The material symbol of violence is literally intercepted by the artist sprawled on the gallery floor.
Teresa Fazan, Dwutygodnik

Photos Pat Mic, Daniel Chrobak