Filipka Rutkowska. Gender Is Over

exhibition map / downstairs

1. Filipka Rutkowska

Different Figures In The Same Character

print on paper, variable dimensions, 2024

“Everything is narcotic and carnal.” The Empire State Building transforms into the Palace of Culture and Science. Handbags pierce the nails. A transgender figure moves on a turtle; they drown in their own reflection, and then in their navel, nipple, and eye.

In an endless trip, Filipka guides us to the limits of the world as we know it. To overturn gender, one must first overturn the entire world. The prints on paper mimic photos from a photo booth, as if mocking the power of truth attributed to photography. These are more like events between the negative and the positive – a space of chaos and confusion. The performer’s task is to disrupt the order and disappear.

2. Filipka Rutkowska

HIS Basic

mixed media, 140 x 132 x 5 cm, 2024

The work was created on the inner lining of an old jacket, previously worn as a kind of camouflage that allowed the artist to blend into her everyday surroundings. As a result of a ritual, the garment was transformed into an object resembling an altar, filled with personal amulets – charcoal used for drawings, scents, and strands of hair – symbols of luck in her fight for emancipation.

One can also view it as skin that the body sheds in disgust. Too tight, belonging to a world of the past. In what ritual was it created?

Is it a Dadaist collage foreshadowing an impending war? A collector’s trophy? The performer’s body, run over by a tire as a joke? No whole can be assembled from its parts; the numbers, sizes, and anatomy do not match.

The work is presented alongside the rap track “Drżenie ciał.”

3. Filipka Rutkowska

Go-go star

mixed media, 112 x 79 x 5 cm, 2025

Diorela

mixed media, 107 x 80 x 8 cm, 2025

42

mixed media, 67 x 67 x 7 cm, 2025

Karen Scott

mixed media, 116 x 79 x 5 cm, 2025

***Crack* i *Pull and Bear***

mixed media, 57 x 70 x 2 cm, 2025 & 51 x 70 x 2 cm, 2025

Reconnaissance

mixed media, 100 x 72 x 3 cm, 2025

These works transform worn-out garments into symbolic objects that explore themes of identity, intimacy, and memory. Before assuming their current form, the performer wore them during moments of varying significance for her own transformation.

Stripped of their practical function, the garments become carriers of meanings linked to everyday use as well as performative presence. Some elements are associated with sexuality, others with power and social role – revealing how desire and domination intertwine. Transcending the divisions between femininity and masculinity, the works evoke forms of life that go beyond imposed norms, invoking theatricality and radical strategies for navigating the world. They unfold as an elegy and a manifesto at once.

In one of the works, a purple splash of colour, with a red-and-black thong glued in the centre, evokes the memory of a first sex date, to which the artist arrived dressed in women’s clothing. Another work – spread out like a butterfly or an altar, fragile and resilient at the same time – serves as a memento of a performance at a club in celebration of the artist’s own birthday. There is something unsettling about the abandoned clothes – without legs, heads, or arms to make them stand straight, sit with knees together, or remain silent unless spoken to. Leaving traces behind: sweat, tears, spit.

4. Filipka Rutkowska

Self-Portrait of a Performer I–VII

installation, 2026

Self-portrait, autobiography, pseudo-biography. Autofiction, life conceived as a work of art. In a series of new works, Filipka once again looks at herself – the performer, this time reduced to two attributes: sunglasses and high heels. A bracket that frames the body from top to bottom, but also marks horizontal movement – a step forward, toward emancipation; a step backward – seclusion and withdrawal. In a comedic tone, the artist attempts to capture not only moments of hesitation, but also moments of “observing herself in action.”

In these self-portraits, the performer appears visibly exhausted. By what? Is s/he battling painting for the art market? Simply by breathing itself? Or perhaps by the intensity of her own presence? S/he attacks her own image, completely erasing the body from it. S/he steps out of her costume for a moment, commanding ordinary everyday objects to be “tools in the fight for minority rights” or “a critique of consumerism.” S/he commands them to become self-parody, a gallery exhibit, art history.

5. Filipka Rutkowska

Filipka in Conversation with Filipka (by Paweł Althamer)

8’10”, 2025

In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a statue of the ideal woman and fell in love with his creation. Fascinated by her beauty, he prayed to Aphrodite to bring the statue to life. The goddess granted his request – the statue came to life and became his wife.

Althamer also sculpts a statue of the ideal woman – one who is neither a woman nor a man. He transforms a living body into an object. The portrait depicts Filipka, his former assistant, as a mythological figure emerging from sea foam, which in antiquity symbolized the fluidity of sexual identity. Unicorns graze in her hair, and Adam and Eve share fruit; the sculpture’s arms bear a blend of eroticism and mythology.

The video depicts a dialogue between Filipka and the sculptural portrait. An interview with her own artistic incarnation – not a mirror image, not a self-portrait, but Althamer’s vision of her, at once herself and a stranger. Combining humour with reflection, the artist poses philosophical questions about emancipation, visibility, and the history of queer people.

“This work holds a lot of tension. The sculptor gives the performer – who by nature loves transience – a new body: resistant to the passage of time, protected by the status of a work of art, insured against accident or theft, placed on a pedestal, treated – glazed and fired – designed to withstand time and unforeseen events.”

6. Paweł Althamer

Filipka

2023

Courtesy of the artist and the Foksal Gallery Foundation

7. Filipka Rutkowska

Nude Descending a Staircase

charcoal drawing, variable dimensions, 2026

“For women whose foot size exceeds standard sizing – which, around size 42, rapidly turns into a festival of latex and glitter – every pair of high heels becomes an event almost as momentous as writing an autobiography.”

The recurring motif of the high-heeled shoe in Filipka’s work has become her trademark. Using charcoal – both as a medium and as a reference to her working-class background and her father’s profession as a miner – the artist breaks down the act of walking in high heels into a sequential study inspired by the work of Marcel Duchamp, particularly his painting Nude Descending a Staircase No.2. Filipka reduces this performative gesture to an image of a heel and a calf – elements whose movement seems to direct the entire body.

The artist reinterprets the Cubist manifesto on the wall connecting the theatre and the gallery. Fantasies of erased boundaries and dismantled words. Fascinated by the avant-garde revolution, Filipka invokes its old strategies and asks how much power remains in them today. Must emancipation mean assimilation? Can we still afford to experiment in a neoliberal world of apparent profit and harmony?

exhibition map / upstairs

8. CASA FILIPKA

Casa Filipka refers to Filipka’s curatorial work – her exhibitions and artistic programs, to which s/he invites other female and trans artists, creating a space for collaboration and exchange.

The name is inspired by the legendary Casa Susanna – a private home in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, which in the 1950s and 1960s became a meeting place for people with non-heteronormative gender identities. Every summer, trans people and those exploring gender expression would gather there to freely express their identities and be themselves among others at a time when transsexuality was illegal.

At the exhibition at Galeria Studio, Casa Filipka is a space for less formal performance. It features intimate, extremely candid works created in early youth, without the intention of being shown. Home-made works, torn from notebooks and drawers, often embarrassing. Some of them date back to before her art history studies and are based solely on personal experience, without any attempt to place them in an artistic context.

It is also a space for creativity rooted in relationships: fascination, friendship, and disappointment. Among them are the films directed by Dawid Nickel. Through his perspective – as a friend and an artist – we see Filipka in various roles: as a son and a daughter, and as a performer fighting with the stage and addiction. Regardless of the role, s/he is always captured with tenderness and a disarming sense of humour.

Casa Filipka opens with two photographs by Hanayo – an artist and Filipka’s friend – taken in Upper Silesia in the 1990s. Against the backdrop of a red curtain, blurred figures perform a mysterious choreography. Someone in a horse costume wobbles on four legs; the air swirls. The circus as a spectacle of mixed meanings and orders.

9. Hanayo

untitled

digital print from scanned analog photographs, 1997/2026

Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film

In 1997, Hanayo visits Poland. She photographs Upper Silesia, primarily Katowice. Filipka is six years old. She’ll be starting school soon, but for now, in stretched-out kids’ tights, with a doll, a turtle, or crayons, s/he hides in her room. Are her little lungs filled with coal dust? The black stone floating in the air is an additional internal organ. Did s/he already like boys back then? Old toys, shared dinners. You can still feel the melting snow in the photographs. Pink nature.

In the exhibition, the photographs appear to expand the landscape of Filipka’s childhood. They fill a gap in the story of a whole life or suggest an encounter that did not take place in that place and time. Fiction is a powerful tool. It makes imaginary things and phenomena exist. We say: “Poland is not a fascist country”. We say: “It’s a boy”. “That is true”.

10. Filipka Rutkowska

Drawings from the Teenage Years

ink and pastels on paper, sketchbook, 20 × 30 cm, 2008

A series of drawings, created in secret during high school classes, takes the form of a sketchbook dedicated to imagined depictions of women. At that time, femininity was a suppressed part of the artist’s identity, revealing itself only in her drawings. Filipka depicted female figures like models inspired by the aesthetics of various eras: from courtly elegance, through punk, to futuristic costumes. Like Orlando in Sally Potter’s film, s/he saw herself outside of time – not fixed in a single image, but fluid. Could s/he have sensed then what the consequences of these drawings would be?

S/he certainly did not plan to show them. At that time, s/he wrote:

“My sketchbooks, like almost all my work, are like receipts. It’s worth keeping them for a while or longer as a keepsake, but in truth they have no greater significance than that they are a sort of byproduct of a moment that involved sorting out thoughts, working through a theme with the help of colours, lines, and gestures, and introducing composition into all of this. These works are perfectly suited for attics; it suits them to be dusty and generally neglected, though I strongly object to their destruction – in extreme cases, I might allow them to be burned. The fact that I hang some of them on the wall stems from a leniency, from the fact that I treat the walls of the room as a canvas and that the entire space in which I live should correspond to the rhythm of my thoughts. Hence the constant rearrangements. This is how I show that my artistic practice consists of not exposing myself to any kind of gaze – personalized art. What may be exposed to the gaze is my behaviour or my developed attitude toward life, but not the intimate pursuit of its purpose.”

Sorting out thoughts. An intimate journey toward one’s goal in life. A clear refusal of public exposure. What significance does the teenage Filipka’s former demand hold today? Is making the contents of those notebooks public a failure to respect the decisions of her former self? Is it an abuse, a forced coming out? In the eyes of the adult Filipka, that artist is no longer just a younger version of herself, but an autonomous artist with her own important voice. “It’s me and not me.” Searching within herself for what is foreign.

What does discovering that work offer? Is it a greater benefit than keeping a promise? The desire to reveal oneself completely. To expose oneself without shame.

It is impossible to dismiss these seemingly minor gestures from the past – markers and coloured pens marking the beginning. An unconscious longing for the self-other, for the self-stranger. A bored, secretly queer child waiting for a transformation during math class.

Filipka’s sketchbook is diverse in nature and consists of fragments of various kinds. These drawings intermingle with aphorisms, confessions about first romantic and sexual experiences, and the despair following their loss. Words turn into black blots; hands and wings sprout from them, spilling onto the next pages. The pen pierces the paper right through, and a heavy hand leaves a mark that will last for years.

Then comes silence and art history. Filipka the student. Orderly, precise sequences of terms, keywords, and definitions.

1) I am inspired by the research of Katarzyna Przyłuska-Urbanowicz, see: What Comes Out (of Me).

11. Filipka Rutkowska

Diaries from Adulthood

mixed media, series 70 × 100 cm, 2024

Collages again. Spray paint, pastels, charcoal, personal items, dried plants. The experiences the artist recounts are composed of many contrasting elements.

Each work reflects moments from Filipka’s life – from office work to sexual encounters, from mundane events to those that set her life on a new course. Despite the diary-like form suggested by the title, time – as in many of the artist’s other works – remains a matter of convention. Some drawings depict specific moments, such as forgetting a card’s PIN code, while others cover almost her entire life, presenting Filipka’s changing appearance over the years in official photographs.

The style is also devoid of rigidity. The artist draws from diverse traditions of art history, depicting the body as fragmentary, stretched, surreal, or restrained. Through this linguistically and visually variable form, the series explores how various events shape the artist’s perception and identity.

It is an assault in her own home. Protests and parties stretching over many days and nights. Nature. Performance. Dangerous sex and intoxication. Wonderful sex and intoxication. Unbearable, fantastic high. The collages give the impression of being created on the fly, impulsively attempting to capture events. Filipka is fascinated by working with memory – memories, journals, sketches, diaries. Not in a sentimental sense, but in its disrupted presence, blurred boundaries, and uncertain status. Memory and forgetting. Recreating oneself anew.

Reality manifests itself in heavy streaks of colour that draw the artist into their whirlpools. Her body, limp and submissive, does not resist the overwhelming force – it merges with it, blurring the contours. Characters and attributes familiar from the artist’s other works appear in the collages. Max the Turtle is both eternal and close, while lipsticks sprout from Filipka’s body like the breasts of the Roman she-wolf. Gender appears in this narrative as a psychedelic experience – beyond consciousness, quivering, fluid, turned upside down; reflected in ancient archetypes and domestic animals, in a vibrating city, and in a body that knows no boundaries.

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