Make your mark with artist Anka Dabrowska in this stencilling placard workshop using found urban materials. We will creatively explore what our queer and other utopias might look like beyond the realms of our current realities. This space invites playfulness through placard-making and conversation to dream into creative possibilities for our queer and other communities. While we are embracing the community and its history, and the deep and rich value of being (queer or other), Anka would like to invite you to portray a view of a utopian future for yourselves and the LGBTQI+ community and others.
Workshop participants will be able to unleash their creativity by crafting their own personalised placards, empowering individuals to share their unique voices and messages. Taking inspiration from Mykola Ridnyi (a Ukrainian artist who deals with political histories blending fact and fiction), Anka refers mostly to his Mazepa Project. This project interrogates the beauty, pain and contradictions of the world, while inviting new ways of seeing: spaces of desire and resistance; spaces for reinvention and possibility.
This event is part of the engagement programme to accompany The Battle Over Mazepa exhibition by Mykola Ridnyi. The programme explores themes of memory, identity and migration.
Pushkin House is committed to making all of our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please get in touch with us if you have a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
About the artist
Anka Dabrowska (she/her, b. 1979 in Warsaw, Poland) is a London-based visual artistworking in drawing, illustration, sculpture and installation art. She collects traces of public and private histories through which we make the city our own. Anka holds an MA (Distinction) in Fine Arts from the University of Northumbria.
Selected solo exhibitions include: A Place In Between (2021, The Old Primark building , Margate, UK); Welcome to Paradise III (2013, Fundacja Sztuczna, Warsaw, Poland); Welcome to Paradise II (2011, Crima’rt Gallery, Milan, Italy) and Welcome to Paradise I (2010, PayneShurvell Gallery, London, UK). Anka recently participated in the Tom of Finland Foundation Arts and Culture Festival (2023, The Standard, London, UK).
Awards include: Art Council National Lottery Project Grant (2021); British Council Travel Grant (2011); Polish Cultural Institute, solo exhibition grant (2010).
Previous workshops include Gay Times (2023, London Pride), Queer and Now Festival (2023, Tate Britain) and Queercircle (2022).