The triumph of arts over taboos
Ars Homo Erotica in Warsaw’s National Museum – a curator’s view
MúzeumCafé 19.
The Ars Homo Erotica exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw comprised more than 200 works of art from antique times to the present century – Greek vases of youths and images of Sappho. All the works related to the theme of homosexuality. The perspective was based on an alternative amorous and artistic standpoint, which always existed in Western civilisation and which frees thought from heterosexual taboos, seeing homoeroticism as an aesthetic quality in visual representation. The presentation of forms of male and female homosexuality has changed much in the course of history. From this derived the exhibition’s epoch-spanning, eclectic nature, presenting a visual world full of allusions, hidden codes, unarticulated insinuations and references, since for a long time these were the only possible forms of homosexual representation. The exhibition generated no small amount of debate throughout Poland. MúzeumCafé asked the exhibition’s curator to outline the ideas behind the venture, its basic concept, artistic achievements and reception. The Ars Homo Erotica exhibition drew from cultural traditions, but within this also touched on the current situation regarding the rights of sexual minorities in east-central Europe. It linked myths and art history with the present, as well as the current debates about the acceptance of otherness, and thus the condition of democracy. The exhibition was welcomed by Professor Piotr Piotrowski, art historian and the new director of the National Museum in Warsaw, as well as his deputy Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, both of whom view the arts from social and political perspectives. It was the first step in realising the aim of repositioning the National Museum and making it an active forum of cultural debate in the region.