There’s Only One Gender: Alicja Żebrowska & Humans Beyond Binaries

alicja-zebrowska-sexfantilis-onone-z-cyklu-swiat-po-swiecie-1998-lamane-przez-2017-fotografia-na-dibondzie-82-x-745-cm_1.jpg, default, ‘Sexfantilis, Onone’ by Alicja Żebrowska, from ‘World After World’ series, 1998–2017, photograph on Dibond, 82cm x 64.5cm, photo: Copyright © Art Agen

#photography & visual arts

In the 1990s, alchemy, esotericism and the transformative reorganisation of social life gave birth to a range of projects by Alicja Żebrowska, initially classified as critical art. They elude straightforward categorisations, however, and remain to a certain extent relevant today.

It is 1994 in Zderzak Gallery, Kraków. At an individual exhibition, Alicja Żebrowska – then on the sidelines of the local art circle having just returned from Vienna, where she had studied art – is holding a premiere display of her project Grzech pierworodny. Domniemany projekt rzeczywistości wirtualnej (Original Sin: Presumed Project of Virtual Reality). Green light illuminates the gallery space, divided by half-transparent acetate. There’s an artificial apple smell in the air, an essence of a fragrance as if from an air freshener. On a wooden shelf there’s a pyramid of green apples, so unlike the fruit of wild, autogenic apple trees that they almost resemble a plastic decoration. On top of all that, a film: the eating of an apple, a blurry, abstracted sexual act, finally a scene of birth, except that instead of a live human baby, a plastic Barbie doll is born, in full make-up, with perfectly coiffed hair and a Hollywood smile.

This peculiar, laboratory-like staging of the story of eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and the consequences thereof bears a motto alluding to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, an allegorical satire on Victorian society set in the world of two-dimensional geometrical figures. In this way, Żebrowska establishes the project’s interpretive perspective: the story of original sin here shapes the eponymous ‘virtual reality’, which refers not to what we nowadays, in the age of VR technology, associate with the term but rather to a conceptual matrix that determines our perception of reality.

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‘When the Other Becomes One’s Own’ by Alicja Żebrowska, 1998–2002, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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One year later, Original Sin makes a return at the Antyciała (Antibodies) exhibition, curated by Robart Rumas in collaboration with Ewa Gorządek in the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Next to the works of, for instance, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zbigniew Libera, Grzegorz Klaman and Rumas himself, only the film and photographs are presented, in a slightly updated and, as Żebrowska herself claimed, ‘spicier’ version. This cropping of the image was a curatorial gesture that took place independently of the artist’s intention. The Barbie emerging from a vagina, presented at one of the flagship exhibitions associated with the phenomenon of critical art, became one of the symbols of the event and to an extent also of the entire formation, even though Żebrowska occupied more of a sideline position. Further, although she didn’t object to feminist interpretations of her work, once unequivocally labelled as such, she started to distance herself from readings that only emphasised a feminist perspective.

However, in 1999, the artist discussed another one of her works in the feminist magazine Ośka (Axis):

My film ‘Tajemnica patrzy’ [The Mystery Is Looking] was a deliberately planned feminist act. […] The Divine Eye, present in the Christian tradition, watches people and judges them. It denounces women’s sexuality with particular severity. It marks her body as a place that’s unclean, forbidden, sinful. I consciously reversed this principle.

The film Żebrowska mentions is one of her best-known projects next to Original Sin. Just as in the scene of Barbie’s ‘birth’, here, too, we see a frame of the artist’s vagina, except this time it’s not obvious at first glance what it is we’re looking at. An artificial glass eye, placed in the labia and decorated with eyeshadow and fake eyelashes, ‘blinks’ at us, then falls out.

Soon after, the film, which was made in the same year as the Antyciała exhibition was taking place, started to be analysed from a feminist perspective. The eye from Żebrowska’s work was mainly viewed as responding to the objectifying male gaze, kind of like a reversal of Courbet’s famous L’Origine du Monde. But the simple image also invites other associations, more mystical and esoteric.

Żebrowska’s exhibit, whose title was derived from this very work, took place at the Gdańsk City Gallery (Galeria Miejska) in 2024. Tajemnica patrzy. Prace z czasu transformacji (The Mystery Is Looking: Works From the Time of the Transition), curated by Jakub Banasiak, comprises what are to a certain extent gleanings from an earlier monumental exposition, Ruchy tektoniczne (Tectonic Movements), also curated by Banasiak in the Museum of Art in Łódź. The exposition complicates the oversimplified perception of the art of the transition period that for a long time lingered in the history of Polish contemporary art. Żebrowska, too, turned out to be a much more ambiguous artist than was initially claimed. Emancipatory on the one hand but on the other hand implying a right-wing political orientation; employing both concrete, naturalistic elements and esoteric metaphors; focused both on the body and on gnostic, New-Age spirituality.

Marta Kudelska wrote about The Mystery Is Looking:

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The eye that appears in the piece is one of the oldest symbols present in human culture. In ancient Egypt, the Eye of Horus denoted rebirth and return to health. In a later period, the eye was enclosed in a triangular shape and became a symbol of the Christian Holy Trinity. It also appears in Masonic iconography, in which it’s known as the Delta and meant to represent the all-seeing God, serving as a reminder that he scrutinizes all the activities of Freemasonry. Żebrowska […] proposes her own interpretation of the motif, adding the figure of the primordial mother Gaia, who creates – or, more specifically, births – a new world through her gaze, at the same time watching it closely.

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‘Rebis Versum I/Strange States of Existence’, from ‘Onone – The World After the World’ series, colour photograph, 1998, photo: courtesy of artist

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Rebis Versum I/Dziwne Stany Istnienia/ z cyklu Onone - Świat Po Świecie. 1998. fotografia barwna, fot. dzięki uprzejmości artystki

In Żebrowska’s art, syncretic, esoteric fascinations are entangled with embodied, concrete elements, thus reflecting the tensions of Poland’s political transition on multiple levels, from the blossoming of alternative forms of spirituality to the formation of new models of gender in deadlock between two forces: the Catholic Church and emancipatory discourses absorbed from the West. Interested in dissecting ‘virtual realities’, Żebrowska attempts to navigate this new social field not so much by joining a particular ideological camp as by concentrating her gaze on what’s removed from view. As Dorota Sosnowska wrote in the magazine Didaskalia: ‘It seems […] that in her art, obscenity is a tool for contesting meanings, not for their creation, for rejecting representation, not for its construction’.

In the social reality in which the right to abortion was radically restricted by legislation from 1993 and in which colourful advertisements screaming from newspapers, billboards and TV screens promote particular forms of gender expression with about as much subtlety as Bierut-era propaganda promoted the masculine ideal of seemingly emancipated working-class women, art made an attempt at its deconstruction. Zbigniew Libera designed a body-building exercise set for toddlers and captured on video ‘training’ a several-year-old girl to perform femininity through make-up, dress and gestures. Katarzyna Kozyra peeked secretly through the door of male and female bathhouses. On top of caricature and cool observation, artists indulged in the fantasies of transcending the limitations of the binary model of gender.

As early as 1986, Libera shot the film Hermafrodyta (Hermaphrodite), which depicted a little boy dancing naked but with his genitals covered in such a way that he resembled a girl. Only a few frames have survived, since the author destroyed the video in the 1980s, fearing that the work would be used to compromise him. In his other piece, Ktoś inny (Somebody Else), Libera himself performs a cross-dressing metamorphosis. Żebrowska went a step further: in Kiedy inny staje się swoim (When the Other Becomes Your Own), instead of performing in front of a camera, she directs the lens at Sara, who is undergoing the procedure of gender reassignment, discovering her own body anew.

Among the various attempts at transcending heternormativity, Żebrowska’s interest in the real-life experience of a transgender person was exceptional on the transition-era art scene. Her attitude toward the figure of the androgyne, quite popular in the art of the 1990s, was nonetheless unique. At the time, the image of a person transcending the binary division appeared, for instance, in Androgyne Gyneandros by Monika Mamzeta. Utilising mirror reflections, the artist superposes images of a naked woman and a naked man. A vertical line dividing the bodies into two halves depicts the combination of the separated halves in a very literal, illustrative way, while at the same time directing attention towards the fissure rather than presenting a bigender whole. Meanwhile, Barbara Konopka, in her work Iluminacje (Illuminations), tackles the subject differently: she blurs gender attributes so that the human being, transformed into a new, androgynous creature, is deprived of traits that would shoehorn them into a dualist order. In one of her most complex and ambitious projects, Onone – świat po świecie (Onone – The World after the World, 1995–99), Żebrowska opts for exactly the opposite solution.

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‘Lola – Otwór Wzrokowo-Słuchowo-Zapachowy’ (Lola: An Optical-Auditory-Olfactory Orifice), installation by Alicja Żebrowska, Museum of Art in Łódź, 2007, photo: Michał Tuliński / Forum

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The video installation and the accompanying series of photographs follow a convention from the intersection of fairytale and science-fiction, and the project’s starting point was a dream the artist had years before. The artist recounted in a conversation with Łukasz Białkowski:

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I was riding a bizarre vehicle, historic and spaceship-like at the same time. I was going uphill along a colourful road. I felt integrated with nature, as if I myself were a plant. I saw the infrastructure, too, technological devices that enabled the development of this nature and remained in a symbiotic relationship with it. There was no tension between technology and nature. That dream was a really intense experience for me, and for a long time it served as a point of reference.

She added, ‘I was a hermaphrodite in that dream, just like the figure appearing in Onone, who talks about the 10 phases of alchemic transformation’.

In Żebrowska’s take on the matter, the androgyne is by no means a figure devoid of sexual characteristics. Quite the contrary: they’re double and magnified. The naked beings, only sometimes dressed in futuristic, completely transparent costumes, are endowed, for instance, with breasts with long protrusions and long, snaky penises, which they can use to satisfy their own sexual needs. In the artist’s vision, the fully self-sufficient Onone [a combination of the masculine singular pronoun ‘on’ and the feminine plural pronoun ‘one’, trans.] don’t even need to communicate with each other; they remain ideal narcissistic monads. Existing in scenery that’s quasi-Arcadian, they don’t even die. Instead, they set out on a space journey from which they return transformed. The project, which was in the process of being created over several years, was never finalised, and its lack of narrative closure only reinforces the extratemporal, oneiric nature of the story.

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‘Światowid’ by Alicja Żebrowska, 1988–92, epoxy resin, sandstone, mirror, postgraduate diploma work, Vienna, 1992, photo: courtesy of artist

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Alicja Żebrowska, "Światowid", 1988-1992, żywica epoksydowa, piaskowiec, lustro. Post-dyplom Wiedeń 1992, fot. dzięki uprzejmości artystki

Reviewing Żebrowska’s Gdańsk exhibition in Dwutygodnik (Biweekly), Karol Sienkiewicz stated: ‘This piece by Żebrowska hasn’t aged well. Under the pretence of a futuristic fantasy, it reduces the subject of non-binary and transgender identities to the question of anatomy’. But anatomy is merely one element of a complex puzzle, more of a tool than a goal in itself. Not only does Żebrowska combine male and female elements, but she also transgresses other binary divisions in unexpected ways: the natural and the artificial, the human, the biological and the technological. Marta Maksymowicz wrote:

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In ‘Onone – The World After the World’, sexuality is what connects the realms of nature and culture. By merging nature and science, the artist combines the body and Logos, perhaps simultaneously subverting other dualisms, such as male-female, past-present and life-death.

Onone experience physical pleasure not only by satisfying themselves but also by connecting to wanton nature through an intricate technology. This kind of welding is an elaboration of the motifs that Żebrowska had already employed in her works from the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the resin sculptures Rekonstrukcja popędu (Reconstruction of Drive), Portyk (Portico) and Światowid, currently exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. According to Jakub Banasiak’s description: ‘Male and female elements merge with each other in individual figures, creating an indissoluble whole, a hybrid of mind and drive, body and spirit. They’re framed by the architecture, which testifies to the perfection of creation’.

Back in 1997, on the occasion of the presentation of the Onone project in Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Paweł Leszkowicz wrote that Żebrowska’s art ‘comes closer to ancient mythology and science-fiction fantasies than to the realness of identity politics’. Nowadays the term ‘identity politics’ recurs much more often in public discourse, making the piece from three decades ago surprisingly relevant. As Leszkiewicz emphasised, Żebrowska’s vision underlines both biologism – a connection to nature and magnified genitals – and the constructed nature of gender: gestures, costumes, props. Sex and gender are simultaneously deconstructed and merged.

However, the magnification of anatomic traits, so characteristic for such video pieces as Żebrowska’s The Mystery Is Looking, here loses its provocative character due to its fantastical-mythological aura. Currently, almost three decades after it was created, Onone not only anticipates, in a way, a whole range of queer utopian imaginaries, such as Kuba Stępień’s All the Stories I Have Ever Told You Were Fiction, but it also demonstrates the possibility of speaking openly about sexuality that transgresses strict heteronormativity in such a way as not to be dragged into culture wars.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English

polish art