Each School Desk Carries a Story

UE: Can you please tell us how you collected the histories that can be seen on the desk surfaces of the school desks in “The Classroom”?

KR: For almost two decades now, I’m traveling across central Eastern Europe, many countries, like countries of ex-Yugoslavia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Romania, Belarus and so on. And I’m doing research by recording the stories, oral histories of older LGBT+, representatives, but also through searching for particular archives, objects from the past.

And that was accumulated in the archive. That’s, in 2015, I called Queer Archives Institute. It’s like an umbrella for the whole project, for the collection, for my findings. And this is always traveling in a performative way through my different shows. It could be more curated. It could be more of my sole expression.

And in The Classroom, I made the selection that it’s touching upon a bit of each country that I visited. Each desk represents some countries, some stories. Sometimes they are more personal. My encounter with particular people, or my visit to the clubs like in Kyiv that I was in 2006, and then it’s not existed anymore and become an archive in history itself.

Also my photographs. Some other parts are more like zines and publications that I find out that were started in the 80s or the 90s in these countries. And those materials are on the display. And with my personal intervention through painting, through collages that I did based on them.