Krzysztof Marchlak’s exhibition deals with the negotiation of boundaries, which in the field of performing identity are set by the social norm, the external gaze, and the fear of otherness and change.

The protagonists of Sleeping Beauty are drag queens. Marchlak portrays six people in the moment of transformation that takes place when putting on the stage costume. It is the moment when a person becomes a character – an artwork that exists on the borderline between art and entertainment, fiction and reality, masculinity and femininity, the personal and the political.

 

Drag queens are associated with queer culture. In this project, Krzysztof Marchlak remains within the realm of this sensibility but he does not confine his reflections about the protagonists to queer discourse. Artistic categories are just as useful here as concepts from the field of identity politics. From the perspective of Marchlak’s project, drag is an interdisciplinary art form containing elements of performance, theatre, acting, fashion and body art.

 

The work of drag queens is ephemeral. The characters created by the artists exist temporarily, only for as long as they are wearing the feminine guise. In Sleeping Beauty, Marchlak freezes these fleeting creations through the medium of photography, seeking to pinpoint their essence not in the final act of the stage performance, but in the preceding phase of the construction of the image. He demonstrates that although the creative work of drag queens leads to a culmination in the form of the stage act, the essence of the artistic dimension of their practice lies in the transformative aspect of this field of creativity.

 

There is a footnote to the works on drag queen culture – the photographs, video projections and recordings of the protagonists talking about drag – presented in the exhibition: photographs in which Marchlak draws on the iconography of St Sebastian. A documentary film, directed by Weronika Plińska and Wojciech Jankowski and dedicated to the artist, serves as an introduction to his work.