QAI / RO

Edited by: Valentina Iancu
Published by blend in studios
300 pages
21 x 15 cm
Softcover
Romanian/ English
ISBN 978-606-9718-00-1

Price: Free

Delivery:
* pick-up from our address in Bucharest, PUNCH satellite shop in Timisoara at Kunsthalle Bega, or by post/courier only together with other items

Contributions by Paul Dunca, Valentina Iancu, Pawel Kubara, Jacopo Miliani, Dragos Olea, Karol Radziszewski QAI/RO reader accompanied the Queer Archives Institute exhibition in Bucharest, hosted by the MNAC in October 2020. Queer Archives Institute is an artistic project launched by the polish artist Karol Radziszewski in 2015, an innate effort growing out of his artistic practice, after a decade of working on identity-oriented research. Radziszewki’s art is oriented towards a performative historization of his own homosexual-male identity, diving with care Central and Eastern European fragile queer memories. His search for historical records of the expression of the same sex desire, questions on gender transitivity and performativity, the reimagination of masculinities were a way of challanging the hegemonic paths of making culture. The bilingual reader includes a selection of interviews done by Karol Radziszewski and Pawel Kubara in 2007 for the Romanian number of DIK Fagazine. Radziszewski started the publication of DIK Fagazine in 2005. The self published zine is the first and yet the only artistic magazine from Central and Eastern Europe approaching queer masculinities. The Romanian number was the second international issue of the zine and gathered prominent voices of the Romanian contemporary art scene: Stefan Botez, Sebastian Moldovan, Vlad Nanca, Paul Dunca, Alex Mirutziu, and the local pop icon, Loredana.

The book features an unique series of photographs, documenting the cruising spots in communist Romanian, taken by Ryszard Kisiel from 1970s and 1980s and tree essays written by Valentina Iancu, Dragos Olea and Karol Radziszewski.