Karol Radziszewski

The exhibition Sebastian im Traum (Sebastian Dreaming) bears the title of a poem by Georg Trakl. Radziszewski speculates on possible histories and missing artefacts in the Austrian poet’s archive in the house where he was born (today a research and memorial site). The artist recontextualises his film MS 101 (2012) about an imaginary encounter between the poet as well as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his lover David Pinsent. The philosopher came to Krakow as an Austrian soldier in 1914, where he wanted to meet Trakl, who was stationed there as a medical lieutenant. Since the latter died shortly before his arrival at the military hospital, all that remains is to imagine what attraction lay at the root of their encounter. The portraits of this invented ménage-à-trois and the icon of queer movements, Saint Sebastian, form an ancestral gallery of homoerotic stories and their potential omission in reading the archives.

The artist Karol Radziszewski (*1980, Białystok) dedicates his research and works to queer personalities to identify voids and ruptures in canonised histories, especially in Eastern Europe. He is also known as the editor of DIK Fagazine (since 2005) and the founder of the Queer Archives Institute in Warsaw (2015). The exhibition Sebastian im Traum at Galerie Kunst im Traklhaus presents his work for the first time in Austria.