CAT. 01// 2025
Hole
Medium: Poem
A poem about being abandoned at dawn, where the language of care fails and a cigarette burn turns heartbreak into a problem with the security deposit.
DIGITAL EXHIBITION CATALOGUE//2025
I Just Wanted to Be an Icon
SOLO EXHIBITION / 2025•Wilcza 16•Warsaw, Poland•Warsaw Queer Week
// EXHIBITION METADATA
ARTISTSIMONA KASPROWICZ
VENUEWilcza 16
LOCATIONWarsaw, Poland
YEAR2025
PROGRAMMEWarsaw Queer Week
CURATORBETTY Q
RUN DATES8–15 June 2025
OPENING8 JUNE 2025, 19:00
EXHIBITION HOURS9–13 JUNE, 16:00–20:00
CLOSING / FINISSAGE15 JUNE 2025
IN COLLABORATION WITHLISOWSKI GALLERY
FORMATSOLO EXHIBITION
STATUSARCHIVED
This digital catalogue documents the works, installation and related events presented in and around the exhibition.
// CURATORIAL STATEMENT
The body, the gaze, and the desire to become an icon
I Just Wanted to Be an Icon brings together works from different moments of Simona Kasprowicz’s practice in a new exhibition structure. Moving image, painting, photography, objects and text return as parts of a fragmented self-portrait: images are repeated, reworked and placed beside one another so that their earlier meanings shift. The exhibition follows self-image and self-production through queer and trans femininity, asking how a body is made visible, becomes a surface for projection and is consumed.
Iconicity appears here as a process rather than a fixed religious code. The body operates as both image and archive, carrying pop-cultural projections, private memory, desire and fragments of earlier performance. Motifs migrate between video, painting, photography and objects; each return alters the form and pressure of the image.
The exhibition does not present a single, completed figure. It gathers repetitions, reproductions and partial views into a dispersed portrait of a practice in motion — one in which visibility can be desired, used and resisted at the same time.
SIMONA KASPROWICZ, 2025
// 03. CATALOGUE OF WORKS
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
Curated editorial sequence of artworks, moving image, and spatial interventions
CAT. 02// 2022
Body/City of Desperation
Medium: Single-channel video, colour, sound, 16:9
An experimental film examining trans and nonbinary embodiment as a site of enforced legibility, where visibility, damage, and desire coexist without narrative resolution.
CAT. 03SERIES // 3 PLATES
This Is Not Rape
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm
Series: Iconoclasm. An ornate cruciform structure exposes and absorbs a body at once, turning the icon of suffering into a device that controls how harm is seen, named and understood.
CAT. 04SERIES // 3 PLATES
The Dialogue of Saint Simona with a Dick
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm
A blue figure assumes the pose of sacred ecstasy as a glittering phallic form rises along the axis of her body, suspending the image between devotion, desire, exposure, and restraint.
CAT. 05SERIES // 3 PLATES
Queer Mother Fucking the Cistem
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm
Series: Iconoclasm. A drag-transformed Madonna and Child shifts a devotional image toward unstable gendered codes and refusal.
CAT. 06// 2021
Skin 2.0
Medium: Single-channel video, 16:9
A stripped-back video returns to a post-violence text as the camera studies skin up close—tracking how words lodge in the body, resurface in rhythm and texture, and refuse closure.
CAT. 07SERIES // 6 PLATES
Untitled I
// 2025
Author: Simona Kasprowicz
CAT. 08SERIES // 3 PLATES
Simona MM
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm
Series: Iconoclasm. A trans-femme self-portrait inhabits Marilyn Monroe pop iconography while withholding the gaze it appears to promise.
CAT. 09Relicing
Installation // 2025
A cruciform structure mounts detached heads, limbs, synthetic hair, and patent boots as relics of a trans-femme figure that has no complete body behind it.
CAT. 10SERIES // 6 PLATES
Untitled II
// 2025
Author: Malga Kubiak
CAT. 11// 2023
Sweet Nothing Love I
Medium: Single-channel video, colour, sound, 16:9
A moving-image work that examines love as residue rather than narrative — intimacy that lingers in the body after its ending, refusing closure, healing, or disappearance.
CAT. 13SERIES // 3 PLATES
Sweet Nothing Love III
Oil on canvas // 2023
Dimensions: 80 × 60 cm
A painting that reassembles visual material from the earlier moving-image work Sweet Nothing Love I: bodies, flowers and interrupted gestures occupy one simultaneous image.
CAT. 14SERIES // 3 PLATES
Ave I
Acrylic on canvas // 2024
Dimensions: 60 × 60 cm
A painting after the earlier performance Ave (2021), rebuilding its residue as an autonomous image.
CAT. 15SERIES // 6 PLATES
Untitled III
// 2025
Author: Natalia Trojgo
CAT. 16SERIES // 7 PLATES
Untitled IV
Photography // 2025
Author: Au Matt
CAT. 171 PLATE
The Couch
360° video, colour, silent, loop // 2025
Author: Video: Au Matt
A silent 360° video in which a sofa, a cigarette and a seated body are displaced from domestic space into an unfamiliar landscape.
CAT. 18SERIES // 3 PLATES
Autopietà
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 60 × 80 cm
A doubled trans-femme self-portrait recasts the Pietà as an intimate encounter held beneath a shared neon halo and above a field of fragmented slurs.
CAT. 19Deus Sex Machina
Installation // 2025
A kinetic devotional figure convulses between self-canonizing prayer, erotic display, and the insults of men responding to the artist’s escort advertisement.
CAT. 20// 2025
Revenge Porn
Medium: Poem
A poem that turns sexual self-staging and rejection into an unstable form of revenge, asking who ultimately controls the image and who is being used by whom.
CAT. 21SERIES // 2 PLATES
Untitled V
// 2025
Author: Simona Kasprowicz
CAT. 22SERIES // 3 PLATES
Fallen Icons
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 25 × 25 cm
Three vertically arranged portraits repeat the codes of the Hollywood blonde, allowing glamour and distortion to sustain the icon without producing a definitive face.
CAT. 23SERIES // 6 PLATES
Untitled VI
// 2025
Author: Natalia Trojgo
CAT. 24SERIES // 3 PLATES
Suicide Attempts
Mixed media on canvas // 2025
Dimensions: 25 × 25 cm
A triptych attaches posthumous headlines about Marilyn Monroe to photographs of the artist’s trans-femme body, while a central panel made with her blood tests how images and bodily traces are forced to testify to a suicide narrative.
CAT. 25// 2025
I'm Going Bananas
Medium: Single-channel video, colour, loop
In a looped performance for camera, the artist fellates a banana, turning a familiar sexual gesture into an overplayed image of desire, glamour and repetition.
CAT. 26// 2021
Ave Manifesto
Medium: Text
A closing manifesto from Ave demanding a culture built with — and not at the expense of — those pushed to its margins.
CAT. 27Fuck the Cistem
Song / audio work // 2024
A queer and trans anthem of survival and refusal, blending spoken-word ferocity with industrial beats.
// INSTALLATION DOCUMENTATION
INSTALLATION VIEWS & ARCHIVE
Photographic documentation of the exhibition space (2 plates)
The Last Supper
The Last Supper opened with the artist feeding the audience pieces of a cake shaped as her own head. The performance then shifted into a reading of unpublished autobiographical fragments, moving through the exhibition and responding directly to works installed in the gallery. Presented as the finissage of I Just Wanted to Be an Icon, the piece moved from an edible self-image to autobiography spoken aloud, bringing the exhibition’s images back into relation with the artist’s own voice and presence.
// 05. EVENTS / FINISSAGE
exhibition dates
2025-09-13 - 2025-09-14
2PROGI
2025-06-15
The Last Supper//@ Wilcza 16, Warsaw / Warsaw Queer Week
2025-06-08 - 2025-06-14
Wilcza 16
// 06. COLOPHON & CREDITS
PUBLICATION COLOPHON
Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition "I Just Wanted to Be an Icon". Rights to individual works and documentation remain with their respective authors and rights holders.
EXHIBITION CONCEPTSIMONA KASPROWICZ
ARTISTSIMONA KASPROWICZ
CURATORBETTY Q
VENUEWilcza 16, Warsaw
PRESENTED DURINGWARSAW QUEER WEEK
IN COLLABORATION WITHLisowski Gallery
PHOTOGRAPHYMalga Kubiak
PHOTOGRAPHYAu Matt
PHOTOGRAPHYNatalia Trojgo
BODY CASTINGAga Szreder
EXHIBITION INSTALLATIONRobert Gajda
EXHIBITION INSTALLATIONKrzysiek Wiluch
MUSIC PRODUCTIONPaweł Bednarczyk
NAIL ARTKlaudia Szydło