Remote Intimacies: Katarzyna Perlak--Broken Hearts Hotel

Broken Hearts Hotel

A deserted Broken Hearts Hotel welcomes you for virtual encounters and tender correspondences filled with love, longing, desire, sorrow and heartbreak (personal, political or both). Perlak explores the potential of the "love hotel" as a temporary, utopian non-space in which we can reinvent love, relationships and ourselves. Link to watch the performance and talk back is HERE. The performance will be followed by a conversation between Perlak and Pawel Leszkowicz.  This public performance and conversation will follow two days of one-on-one encounters with the artist, during which visitors can choose to overshare broken heart histories, take an intimacy quiz, dance across the screen, or listen to a bedtime story read just to you. These will take place on April 9th and April 10th. Please sign up for an idividual session HERE.

Remote Intimacies is a series of performances commissioned and co-organized with the Leslie Lohman Museum. The invited artists explore how to sustain intimacy in these highly mediated times, and how to imagine opportunities for communion across temporal and geographic distances. This series of performances and encounters takes its title from scholar Karen Tongson’s theory on the powerful resonance of shared consumption and their capacity to “bring people, things, and concepts together, even if space and time dictates their dispersal and isolation." This series is organized and introduced by Stamatina Gregory, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Alexis Bard Johnson, Curator and Jeanne Vaccaro, postdoctoral fellow at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. 

Katarzyna Perlak is a Polish born artist, based in London whose practice employs video, performance, sound and installation. Perlak’s work is driven by politics and feelings; examines queer subjectivities, migration and potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present continuous and past historical moments. She is currently developing ‘tender crafts’ methodology and explores the relationships between notions of utopia, hope and the concept of the ‘wish landscape’. Perlak background is in Philosophy, which she studied in Poland and Fine Art Media that she has studied in UK (Camberwell College of Arts and Slade School of Fine Art).  Her films have been shown widely at film festivals across Europe. She was part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017, and shows internationally, including: Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennial, Art Night London, Liverpool Biennale and Detroit Art Week. (Website: katarzynaperlak.com; Instagram: @kat_perlak)

Pawel Leszkowicz  is a Professor in the Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. He is an academic lecturer and a freelance curator  specializing in international contemporary art, curatorial and LGBTQ studies. He is the author of the Ars Homo Erotica (2010) exhibition at Warsaw's National Museum and numerous queer exhibitions and symposia in Poland and the UK. He has written four books: Helen Chadwick: The Iconography of Subjectivity (2001), Love and Democracy: Reflections on the Homosexual Question in Poland (2005),  Art Pride: Gay Art from Poland (2010), and The Naked Man: The Male Nude in post-1945 Polish Art  (2012). His  contributions have been published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, New York University Press, Ashgate and Manchester University Press. He was a  Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Sussex in Brighton (2011-2014) and a Senior Fulbright  Research Fellow at One Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles (2015-2016) and  the EU EURIAS Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2016-2017). He is  a member of the International Art Critics Association (AICA). Currently he works on a public art festival in Poland, Lublin, and Gdansk on the subject of hospitality and ecology.

Image Credit: Katarzyna Perlak ‘Happily Ever After’ (2019), curated by Kasia Sobucka, Detroit Art Week, Photo: Jasen Bergamini