07/04/2026
Documentation of the show: The B***r From My Heart
Artists: Mikołaj Sobotka Paweł Donhöffner Zięba
Curator: Arek Dec
Venue: CU at Sadka
Photographer: Michał Maliński
Duration: 13.03 – 03.04.2026
Masculinity is not a state but a process: something performed, worked through, tested, and constantly negotiated. It is relational, affective, and fragile, prone to fractures and dependent on the gaze of others. The exhibition The B***r From My Heart treats masculinity not as a stable identity but as a field of tensions between desire and norm, love and power, corporeality and institutions. In this narrative, masculinity is filtered through failure, shame, and perversion. Shame functions both as an immediate emotion and as an affect linking body, psyche, and social structure, delineating the boundaries of what is permissible and visible (Ahmed).
For the works presented in the exhibition by Mikołaj Sobotka and Paweł Zięba, shame constitutes a starting point, although each artist adopts a different strategy. In Zięba’s case, the focus lies on evoking desires that bourgeois provincialism is unable to acknowledge publicly. The artist places the viewer in the role of a vo**ur observing scenes of intimacy and s*x. The drawings have a colloquial character, showing the casualness of experiencing desire. Arousal, which most of us feel once, twice, three times a day… every hour, is aptly captured by the suffix p**n — like a reaper with a bottomless stomach to whom we offer sacrifices: meme, game, s*x — whatever.
Sobotka approaches the matter differently. His blurred drawings, seen through baroque–PRL-style glass, are partially obscured. The fe**sh, he seems to suggest, must remain hidden. Reflections reveal an enlightenment candle, a mask, a choker, a leather belt, a p***s pump, or a liquefied brain whose nervous system appears on the verge of explosion. The game of masculinity is not simple; it requires constant adjustment, symbolically echoed in the prefix mask within the word masculinity. “What do other boys feel? What do normal people feel?” asks Yukio Mishima in Confessions of a Mask, concealing his ho******ic desires and sadistic nature. For the protagonist, life becomes a minefield where every wrong step risks exposure and consequences.The dynamics of this game are aptly metaphorized by C. J. Pascoe, who shows how, within groups of boys, the term “fag” functions in everyday interactions like a game of hot potato, in which everyone tries to pass it on to someone else.
An example of a culture of guilt and shame is exposed by Sion Sono in the film Love Exposure, showing how religious institutions and Christian morality drench s*xuality in the grease of sinfulness. We move from repression — “Don’t even think you can be good!” — to perversion — “Yes, you are a naughty boy!” In this sense, the exhibition The B***r From My Heart traces a triple trajectory: the path of s*xuality from repression to perversion, and the path of perversity from alienation to acceptance. Morality and desire intertwine here into a single libidinal chain linking guilt, shame, and longing. For the protagonist Yo, thrown into orbit around this foreign system, love remains genuine; yet what can he do when, at the sight of Yoko — the girl he falls in love with — he cannot restrain his swelling er****on? Sono’s film also reveals the q***r potential of identity: the path to love leads through confrontation with what is feminine, ambiguous, and repressed within the subject.
For Sobotka and Zięba, elements of the bourgeois home form part of their imaginary — on the one hand carrying the valuable legacy of fathers, on the other weighing down like a ball and chain. Zięba deals with this heritage by reaching for a gramophone with a record-drawing resembling the cover of a punk album, or by placing his drawings on a stylish postwar all-in-one device. While drawing paper seems suitable for casual scenes of everyday desire, Zięba’s painting operates differently: the canvases carry a more elevated charge, vulgarity softens, and Art Nouveau–like interiors take on the mystery of film noir, evoking inner emptiness and fate. Yet Zięba uses nostalgia sparingly — only enough to create a vibe for characters whose bodies, faces, and limbs seem to dissolve, disintegrating not into particles but into waves. If the bourgeois father’s home is a kind of dystopian fate, the question arises of how to work with memory and the inheritance of power structures. The narrative surrounding Zięba’s world intertwines the necessity of fulfilling the role of masculinity with the experience of disintegration, raising the question of whether the Oedipal curse can be reversed and rewritten. How not to become the uncle, how not to become the father-in-law?
While Zięba presents an intimate perspective, Sobotka weaves a web of masculinity by mapping relationships in relation to the public sphere. In his repertoire of images, notation remains ambiguous, and the artist focuses on how the same objects — gloves, masks, belts — appear in different rituals and social spaces, carrying different meanings. They may belong to the order of elegance and class distinction, serve hygienic or ceremonial functions, and at the same time constitute elements of uniform and military discipline. Masks, present in theatre, religious rituals, and carnival, enable a temporary suspension of social roles. In military contexts and later in B**M, the mask becomes fe**shized, and relations of domination and submission are inscribed into the dynamics of bodies that derive pleasure from them. The belt, organizing the silhouette and fastening the uniform, perverts into a tool of punishment and erotic play, becoming a carrier of violence circulating between public, domestic, and s*xual spheres. Covering the face and the distance produced by uniform facilitate the suspension of ethics and make it easier to inflict pain, including in self-destructive forms (Karwatowska).
By choosing very specific objects and placing them at the center — without unnecessary contextualization — Sobotka universalizes them, linking them to global power structures and showing the influence of the wealthiest elites in business, politics, and the military in shaping masculinity, creating the bundle of traits that gender studies researchers describe as hegemonic. Not every man, however, wants or has the possibility to enter the role of hegemon (Hearn). If hegemonic masculinity is placed at the center, men outside the system of power inhabit the margins. As Michał Grygierczyk argues in his analysis of Trash Story by Mateusz Górniak, the garbage dump turns out to be an attractive place to live. Among rubble and waste, masculine subjectivity can shed its burden and experiment with what its new home — a nomadic landfill — might become. The bodies of Górniak’s characters, like those of Zięba, are not ideal — often deformed and prone to disintegration, marked by introspection and melancholy.
The image of “garbage masculinity” and family also appears in the film Jessica Forever, which, in an apparently distant and incomprehensible world, follows the fate of an unusual family — a group of orphaned boys and the titular Jessica, their saintly guardness. On the “dump of civilization,” they search for a place where they can settle and create a new home. Their manifesto reads: “We have no rights, so we will take everything; our love is like a comet, like a Kalashnikov loaded with bullets.” This is not heroic pathos but a raw, sincere attempt to live and love on one’s own terms in a world that has rejected them. Masculinity does not have to mean power or domination, and family does not have to be a traditional arrangement. What matters are relationships, mutual support, and tenderness — they become the new force and the foundation of the home they build themselves.
The suitcase cut open by Sobotka — a sign of the bourgeois world of the previous century — reveals its insides. Inside is placed an anime drawing functioning on the border of aesthetics such as pantsu shot, e***i, and moe. These motifs recur throughout the artist’s practice and find parallels in Zięba’s works. The reference to Japanese visual culture is useful because it reveals a highly developed language of fe**shes and perversions. Cutting the suitcase acts as a gesture of exposure: an elegant, stylish form conceals a cluster of the repressed, balancing between innocence and perversion. Packing perversion into a suitcase is an idiom of bourgeois culture — its collection of books and films. “Our society is still a bourgeois society,” wrote Roland Barthes in the twentieth century. Today, the concept of the bourgeoisie sounds like a relic, as power is increasingly taken over by techno-elites and digital players. Yet insofar as it continues to play a key role in the education system, participates in reproducing inequality, and holds a significant portion of cultural capital, it cannot be easily sunk. In a metaphorical scene, this is illustrated by Mandico in the film Wild Boys, when the Captain throws the books of “depraved” youths into the water as part of an experimental therapy. Discipline and proper diet (estrogen-rich fruits from a mysterious island) serve as remedies for a natural tendency toward violence. A touch of feminization — Mandico seems to suggest — will save the world.
While gender studies focused on the socially constructed nature of femininity and masculinity, contemporary trans studies broaden the perspective by considering the role of hormones in shaping gender identity and s*xuality. Pharmaceuticals and s*xuality are politically and economically correlated and together form the matrix of what Paul B. Preciado, in Testo Ju**ie, calls contemporary pharmacop**nographic capitalism. In Mandico’s work, estrogenic fruits functioned as medicine against violence among boys, whereas for Preciado, taking testosterone becomes a “technique of resistance for bodies assigned as bio-female — as if to catch the breath of masculinity, to become intoxicated with masculinity.” Speaking in the voice of Séverine from Wild Boys: with hormonal transformation, new perspectives open up. Hormones influence the body, social expression, and relations of power, making them a field of both reproduction and destabilization.
The B***r From My Heart does not offer simple answers or affirmative narratives about a “new masculinity.” Instead, it reveals fractures, contradictions, and affective costs inscribed in the very process of its production. Masculinity appears here as a field of tensions between desire and norm, power and helplessness, the public and the shameful. The exhibition does not so much propose an escape from this game as allow us to see it — together with its props, masks, and debris — and to ask what else might happen if…
