The exhibition Atlas of Tangled Tales, presented within the WroPRIDE Wrocław Pride Festival 2025, brings together time-spanning and border-crossing threads of queer historiography in one space. Artists Irène Mélix and Liliana Zeic shed light on public and private archives as they seek to retell the stories of those who were oppressed. They interweave narratives relating to the shared history of the Polish-German borderlands, as well as the cities of Dresden and Wrocław.
Irène Mélix and Liliana Zeic’s exhibition Atlas of Tangled Tales, presented within the Queer Studio, draws upon seven visual works sourced from archives both public and private. The artists seek out queer feminist histories, the stories of lesbian, nonbinary, and transgender people. Liliana Zeic explores the possibility of retelling the biographies of queer individuals previously framed by documentary material contained within archives of oppression. Irène Mélix, digging through Dresden-based collections, wonders at the fate of those making up the city’s queer community during the twentieth century. With this shared perspective, the artists examine time-spanning and border-crossing Polish-German threads in queer historiography, articulating new connections between events, places, and moments in time. Employing techniques such as collage, painting, video essays, portraiture, intarsia, and audio material, the artists develop an extraordinary constellation encompassing the afterimages and shadows of concealment and exclusion, as well as the sparks and rays of sunshine emanating from love letters. The exhibition reveals for us the full spectrum of colors, range of emotions and impressions, and diversity of queer lives.
- Artists: Irène Mélix, Liliana Zeic
- Exhibition curator: Joanna Synowiec
- Gallery curator: Joanna Stembalska
- Visual identification: Anna Wacławek
- Exhibition design: Iwona Ogrodzka
- Production: Natalia Budzińska, Monika Muszyńska
- Promotion: Żaneta Wańczyk
- Accessibility: Magdalena Weber
- Assembly: Jakub Jakubowicz, Tomasz Koczoń, Marcin Pecyna
- Audience engagement: Daria Chraścina
- Editorial oversight and translation: Joanna Osiewicz-Lorenzutti and the strona 895 | page 895 team
- BWA Wrocław program: Katarzyna Roj
- Exhibition partnerships: Stowarzyszenie Kultura Równości, Museum of Forensic Medicine at Wroclaw Medical University, QueerMuzeum Warsaw
- Media matronage: Replika Magazine
phot. Alicja Kielan
