Alex Baczynski-Jenkins

YOU ARE A GUEST NOW

Artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins presents a new iteration of his ongoing film work, You are a guest now. The film interweaves intimate moments between four artists and friends in Warsaw, to give a poetic account of queer life, friendship, performance and love thriving both despite of, and in resistance to the hostility of the state towards LBGTQIA+ communities in Poland. You are a guest now sits between the genre of documentary and what the artist refers to as a ‘cine-performance’.

Throughout the film, Baczynski-Jenkins and his collaborators emphasise alternative ways of living and of being together, invoking shared spaces of belonging and recognition. Here, intimate gestures of friendship, pleasure and support are traced as modes of queer homemaking. This ongoing film was initiated in 2019, and with each further invitation for the work to be presented, new footage is recorded and edited to form a new iteration. In 2023 the film is due to premiere as a feature-length documentary.

In the House of my Love, the title of this year’s Brent Biennial, borrows its name from a line in A poem to the Nationalist Marcher (for the Queer people of Warsaw) written by Ezra Green in 2018, which is read aloud in the film.

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire. Relationality is present in the dialogical ways in which the work is developed and performed as well as in the materials and poetics it invokes. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of everyday experience, the utopian and latent queer histories. He approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on the matter of feeling, perception and collective emergence, while indulging in other ways of experiencing memory, time and change. He is co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice. Through various experimental formats and community building, Kem engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.

Instagram: @baczynski.jenkins

Access key: online viewing (please contact kit@metrolandcultures.com for a link), subtitles (English)

Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah‘s exhibition was commissioned as part of the Brent Biennial 2022, titled ‘In the House of my Love’, in co-production with LUX. The second edition of the Biennial asked how, and why, the act of making home can be a form of resistance and survival within the context of hostile environments—including those of racism, homophobia, ableism, climate catastrophe and political austerity. The Brent Biennial 2022 was curated by Eliel Jones, in collaboration with a curatorial committee comprised of artists Adam Farah, Abbas Zahedi and Jamila Prowse. Find out more by visiting the Archive.