projects KPH

1 – Coming Out in public Poland

The project Let them see us (Niech nas zobaczą) showed 30 photographs of homosexual couples: 15 gay couples and 15 lesbian couples. Their pictures, taken by Karolina Bregula, were plastered on billboards in the major Polish cities in March 2006. This is the first campaign in Poland, the aim of which is to act against homophobia and discrimination on the background of sexual orientation.

The billborads were supposed to stay up for two months, but catholic groups protested to city officials and so they came down after just a week. Even the mayors of Warsaw and Krakow have refused to allow them in their cities. Some were painted over. Still, the campaign was a success, becasue a public debate about gay rights started and homosexuals were shown as they are: just normal people as everyone else. If homosexuals look so common and regular they must be as normal as him/her - the viewer.

2 – Offended

Campaign Against Homophobia realised between 5th and 14th March 2007 a social ad campaign within the framework of the anti-homophobia action week of Council of Europe's initiative All Different All Equal. The campaign brought two editions of posters to the streets of Warsaw, with the aim to provoke citizens to feel the level of pressure and hatred that surrounds lesbians and gays and their friends and families every day.

The campaigns teaser posters "What are you staring at, faggot!?" and "What are you staring at, dyke!?" are used as a symbolic summary of all the wide-spread forms of homophobia in Poland today – regular hate-speech from the leading politicians, growing intolerance and exclusion by the other groups of society, negative stereotyping by the media etc. The teasers are to evoke the feeling of being attacked, being insulted and create an understanding of what are the effects of homophobia; the whole campaign aims to combat negative attitudes and intolerance towards lesbians and gays.

People that saw the posters felt shocked and insulted. Some even called the provider of the surfaces for posters to demand that the posters shall be taken down. One of the aims of the campaign is to encourage the citizens to speak up against homophobia more, not only in the extreme cases.

3 – Exhibition

March 5th was the opening date for a two-weeks exhibition on collected pieces of homophobia – newspaper articles, magazine covers, news clips and much more. All of the presented materials are collected over the past years and are in a way or another symbolically highlighting the amount of hatred and prejudices that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans-people and their families and friends are surrounded by.

Sentences like “we will manage without tolerance,”; “when faggots begin to demonstrate, they should be beaten with sticks,” are part of the average every-day language of Polish politicians, officials and even government members. The exhibition picks out these examples from around us, puts them on a wall, and makes it impossible to pretend that such things do not happen and homophobia is not a problem in Poland.