ul. Wilcza 16, Warsaw
opening night: 8 June 2025 (Sunday), 7:00 PM
exhibition open: 9–13 June, 4:00–8:00 PM
closing event: 14 June 2025 (Saturday), 7:00 PM
The exhibition is presented as part of Warsaw Queer Week in collaboration with Lisowski Gallery.
The exhibition I Just Wanted to Be an Icon engages with the language of the icon—not as a sacred figure, but as a mechanism of cultural projection. The icon becomes a symbol overloaded with meaning—sacred and worn out, adored and rejected, eternal and wounded. The titular gesture speaks to a longing for visibility, belonging, and recognition—desires that, in the lived experience of queer and trans people, often blur the boundary between body and image, between subject and representation.
Simona Kasprowicz explores this theme through a complex intermedial structure. She constructs an environment where image, sound, text, performance, and archival material coexist with media generated by artificial intelligence. AI is not just a tool but an active aesthetic medium—a collaborator in remixing, duplicating, distorting, and emotionally overloading the image.
Drawing on post-pop aesthetics and autotheory, Kasprowicz develops a language built on fragmentation, excess, and repetition. At the center of her practice is the body—unstable, torn between roles, styles, and systems of visibility. Pop culture and religious icons—such as Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Mary Magdalene—are not merely referenced, but inhabited and reimagined through queer memory, spirituality, and embodiment.
Body, image, and technology remain in constant flux—breaking down and reassembling. The AI-generated works are not technical experiments but acts of reclaiming a medium defined by simulation and reiteration. AI becomes part of a queer performance of memory—producing distorted doubles, repeating gestures, generating imperfection. The machine does not represent the body; the body allows itself to be possessed—becoming image, memory, and glitch.
The materials used go beyond image-making and embrace what is cheap, disposable, and excessive: trash, plastic, synthetic fabrics, LED lights, glitter, trinkets from AliExpress. These marginalized, campy, domestic aesthetics carry grief, resistance, and queer survival. The exhibition space resembles a chapel made of remnants—a site where shimmer does not conceal the wound but reveals it.
I Just Wanted to Be an Icon is not a narrative of transformation or affirmation. It is a story of suspension—between self and double, between gesture and digital echo. This is not a museum of icons, but a chapel of wounds: a space where instability, uncertainty, and emotional residue create a language of existence. The protagonists do not seek recognition. They persist—as image, pixelated trace, performative scar. What remains when identity is fractured between code, body, and myth? Perhaps just this: a flicker of presence that refuses to disappear.