Sweet Jesus!

Sweet Communion

The interplay between the communion host and jam foregrounds the host’s physicality while deliberately diminishing its original gravity. It’s a small act of defiance against the oppressive religious landscape in Poland.

The gesture invites a playful engagement with an object saturated with emotional weight from personal and collective histories. The communion host carries affective memory shaped by fear, guilt, and shame, and by bodily rituals of discipline—kneeling, swallowing—through which religious power has been internalized and enacted, especially upon queer communities and women’s bodies. This intervention breaks a deeply ingrained taboo with camp humor. After all, why should communion be dry when jam can make it a little sweeter?

She-Pope

In 2016, I created a performative expansion of my installation Sweet Jesus. During this event, I served communion hosts with jam while dressed as a drag version of a pope. Unlike the earlier iteration, the hosts were not presented as artifacts or art objects. Instead, they became a delectable dessert.

Although I risked arrest¹ and assault, the event transformed the gallery into a fleeting carnival of queer joy. As a result, the happening brought visitors together in a shared act of defiance. This took place amid the heightened anti-LGBTQ+ climate under the PiS government.t.²

1. Polish law prohibits insulting religious feelings (Article 196) ↩︎
2. During the rule of the Law and Justice party (Prawo i
   Sprawiedliwość, PiS), which governed Poland in 2015–2023, the political landscape became increasingly aligned with the
   Catholic Church. This period saw the intensification of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and propaganda, alongside further restrictions on reproductive rights, including the near-total ban on abortion. These shifts contributed to a broader climate of moral policing and institutional pressure on queer communities. ↩︎