Izabella Gustowska’s Victim series as a case of queer feminist art in Central Eastern Europe

The essay aims to analyze an artwork devoted to lesbian love created in 1988 by Polish feminist and intermedia artist Izabella Gustowska, who started her career in the 1970s. The artwork Victim I (1988/1989), which is the subject of an intertextual interpretation, is one of the few unique portraitures of female same-sex couples and eroticism in art from behind the Iron Curtain (1945-1989), created from the feminine perspective. Hence, it took a very prominent role in the major exhibition Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2009), curated by Bojana Pejić. The exploration of female figuration and various dimensions of femininity is a recurrent theme in Izabella Gustowska's art of photographic and filmic portraiture and self-portraiture. In her search for multiple and complex images of femininity, she is one of the precursors of representations of female intimate relationships, togetherness, and homosociality in the Eastern bloc. The text intends to elucidate the political, religious, amorous, and artistic context of the Victim series in Poland and Central Eastern Europe, locating it in the cultural framework of the region and the nascent queer movement in Poland in the 1980s.