Vampires, It’s Nothing To Laugh at
Video Installation
2022
This 3-channel installation uses the figure of a Slavic vampire as a metaphore for migrant identity and otherness. The work explores the notions of truth and fiction by examining various tools and systems of power that seem to allow us to distinguish one from the other. The piece explores issues of colonialism, academic classism and ethics of representation. It tells a story of loosing one’s identity and reinventing onself anew.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Tytus Szabelski.
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Casting, film still, Kinga Michalska.
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Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh at, film still, Kinga Michalska.
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Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh at, film still, Kinga Michalska.
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Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh at, film still, Kinga Michalska.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
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Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
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Borders, film still, Kinga Michalska.
Video Installation
2022
This 3-channel installation uses the figure of a Slavic vampire as a metaphore for migrant identity and otherness. The work explores the notions of truth and fiction by examining various tools and systems of power that seem to allow us to distinguish one from the other. The piece explores issues of colonialism, academic classism and ethics of representation. It tells a story of loosing one’s identity and reinventing onself anew.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Tytus Szabelski.
Casting, film still, Kinga Michalska.
Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh at, film still, Kinga Michalska.
Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh at, film still, Kinga Michalska.
Vampires, It’s Nothing to Laugh at, film still, Kinga Michalska.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
Discomfort of Evening, installation view, Zachęta National Gallery, curated by Magdalena Komornicka, Warsaw 2022, photo by Hanna Linkowska.
Borders, film still, Kinga Michalska.
Diary
2013-now
Montreal
I started this series 10 years ago when I first arrived in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Having left Poland in part due to the climate of censorship of queerness, I intuitively started documenting my life. Photography has been my tool for facilitating connections as I coutinue to cultivate queer community. A collection of video portraits and intimate photographs and writings, Diary is a queer meditation on home, love, and kinship. This work has been shown in gallery settings in Montreal, London, Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań. In 2021, the series received an honorable mention at the TIFF Open competition at the Polish Photography Festival.
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Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
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Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
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Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
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Winnie, Gen and Bean
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10 Pine
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Sarah, Bear, Bunny, Small Phoque, Big Phoque and Bat.
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Be and Lee
2013-now
Montreal
I started this series 10 years ago when I first arrived in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Having left Poland in part due to the climate of censorship of queerness, I intuitively started documenting my life. Photography has been my tool for facilitating connections as I coutinue to cultivate queer community. A collection of video portraits and intimate photographs and writings, Diary is a queer meditation on home, love, and kinship. This work has been shown in gallery settings in Montreal, London, Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań. In 2021, the series received an honorable mention at the TIFF Open competition at the Polish Photography Festival.
Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
Installation view “Poganki”, curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, lokal_30, Warsaw 2021, phot. Marcin Liminowicz.
Winnie, Gen and Bean
10 Pine
Sarah, Bear, Bunny, Small Phoque, Big Phoque and Bat. 
Be and Lee
Navid
Carmen
Guy and Jamaal
Sarah’s ferns
Crystal’s wig
Moe
Andy
Eliane’s bananas
George, Pomona and Rose
Candi
Alice, Navid and Nima
Sarah Mo
Kinga
Parents
Naomi and Kai
Jordan Brown
Lactatia and Crystal
Vanja
Jamaal
Winnie
E.
Kai and Naomi
10 Pine
Lari
Installation view “The Kitchen”, curated by Polana Institute, The
Clay, Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Warsaw 2020
Installation view, MFA Open Studios 2018
Installation view, MFA Open Studios 20182019
During my residency at the Gay Archives of Quebec in 2019, I came across a press clipping of an add announcing the upcoming release of “Efebos: The First Polish Magazine of Male Nudes (1991)”. When I was in Poland, I searched for that magazine in Lambda Warsaw Gay Archives. I found more of the same adds, but I was sad to realise that regardless of multiple enthusiastic announcements of it's imminent release, the magazine never actually came out. Having learned this, I decided to make an issue of this magazine myself, as a tribute to all the great queer DIY activist initiatives that failed - the art projects that were abandoned and collectives that fell apart before their first action. The result is a work of speculative fiction - a utopian erotic magazine focused on representing some of those whose absance hounts the queer archives: lesbians, bisexual women, trans and non-binary folks. For this reason I renamed it “Efebia”. I did an open call for photo submissions and for participants in an erotic shoot. I received 1 photo series and 6 model submissions. I rented a room at the legendary hotel Czarny Kot in Warsaw. We shot all day and made friends. I placed one copy of the magazine in Warsaw Gay Archives in the 90s section.
Archival photograph featured in the magazine.
Cover image featuring Sonia Milch.
Centerfold featuring Katarzyna Szugajew.
Back cover featuring Kinga Michalska
Efebia at "La présence de l’absence - Absence is Present", curated by
Virginie Jourdain, Veronique Boilard, Never Apart, Montreal, Qc, 2019.2020, Montreal
This project was an invitation for community discussion and experimentation with a form of qroup sexting. Online dating and long distance relationships are becoming a lived reality for many of us. How can we practice embodied digital erotics while challenging heteronormative expectations of goal-oriented sex and sexting? If we understand sex as more than a stimulation of intimate parts, but a wide spectrum of experiences focused on mutual (or/and self-) pleasuring (and by pleasuring I mean a full spectrum of the word pleasure which expands beyond the body) and if we think of the word “queer” as a verb which means “to put in question” and “to trouble”, then can we look at sexting as a possibility for queering the notion of sex?
Queer Sexting Party at Ada X, Montreal, Qc. In collaboration with Carmen Collas and Lesbian Speed Dating. Photo documentation by Vjosana Shkurti.
2017-now
Five years after immigrating to Canada to pursue my gay dream, I return to my homeland to revisit what it means to be Polish and queer. This ongoing portrait series is a love letter to friends who inspired me in how to own this complex identity.
Kasia 
Miko and Artur
Martyna and Zofka
Kasia and Emil
Dominik
Kinga
Kinga Michalska (they/them)
kingamichalska@yahoo.com
ig @kinga.mi.666
All rights reserved Kinga Michalska
I’m a Polish queer visual artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtiá:ke, Mooniyang, Montreal. I use mediums of photography, film and video installation to examine shared cultural spaces such as home, kinship, land, memory and hauntings through a queer feminist sensibility. I am interested in the periphery of what and who makes history: queer intimacies, amateur historians, geological processes, personal archives, oral history and speculative fictions. I create intimate, bold, visceral images with playful and sensual undertones. My work is collaborative and rooted in informed consent with the participants. As questions of relations of power are at the core of my work, they are committed to questioning my own position within stories I tell and communities I represent in their work.
I hold an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw. Over the last four years my work has been presented in Canada, UK, Poland, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. My research has been generously supported by Catapult Film Fund, CALQ, Canada Arts Council, Claims Conference Fund and Telefilm Canada. I am currently directing my first feature documentary Nolandia produced by Catbird Productions.
I hold an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw. Over the last four years my work has been presented in Canada, UK, Poland, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. My research has been generously supported by Catapult Film Fund, CALQ, Canada Arts Council, Claims Conference Fund and Telefilm Canada. I am currently directing my first feature documentary Nolandia produced by Catbird Productions.