Body & Sex - Puppet is a Human, too?

Exhibition of theatrical puppets

The art and mass culture of the last decade has been increasingly dominated by problems of the body and gender. Biological and cultural gender, its social role, and gender identity dilemmas. Objectification, the instrumental treatment of the body and gender, increasingly occupies artists, researchers and critics. Artistic and cultural phenomena are accompanied by an increasingly deepened and broadened humanistic reflection. Gender studies flourish, queer theory develops.

Puppet theater, viewed from this perspective, seems to be an extremely rich and graceful field of penetration. The warehouses of Polish puppet theaters are a real treasury, full of artistic specimens of femininity and masculinity - biological and cultural sex, objects representing and embodying the ideals of female and male beauty or ugliness; objects of sexual desires, dreams and fears; symbols of masculinity and femininity. There will also be androgynous, asexual and perversely playing with their sexuality.

On the occasion of the Puppet is a Human too Festival, I propose an exhibition of theatrical puppets about the body and gender. It will bring - I hope - many aesthetic impressions to the visitors. It can also induce to expand the field of gender studies, to make polemic-sounding diagnoses and to reflect further. Well, for example, in puppet theater we do not observe the dehumanizing process of objectification of the body and gender, which is so painfully felt in art and contemporary culture. On the contrary, artists are still striving to empower the body and the object.

Agnieszka Koecher-Hensel

The exhibition was organized by Impossible Theatre Union in cooperation with the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw.
Scenario: Agnieszka Koecher-Hensel and Robert Dul
Arrangement project: Jacek Zagajewski
Realization: Anna Kreczmer and Zbigniew Kornatowski

We would like to thank the directors, employees and artists of Polish puppet theatres for their help in organizing the exhibition and lending exhibits.

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