“A moment of relief. You thought the gore show was over and the monster had met its end in one of those anatomically explicit scenes of ketchup-splattered carnage when —suddenly—it comes back to life, still fixated on your death. If you were ever going to scream, now is the time.”1 — Nick Land, Fanged Noumena

Pomadka Teresa is a black hole in Polish art—a singularity in which the trajectories of pop culture become subject to extreme coupling. Works produced through assemblage and compression bend their source forms, suspending them in a state of persistent endurance and drawing them into a peculiar topology. The plastics and silicones of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills melt into a single mass. Their faces, left too long beneath the desert sun of Los Angeles, disintegrate like Glenn Close in The Stepford Wives. Because death suits Pomadka.

Fisher wrote that weirdness de-realizes the real and makes the fictional real. It is the intrusion of something that should not be present in a given place and yet stubbornly remains there, producing a disturbance in which the boundary between the real and the fictional begins to dissolve.2 Something similar happens in Pomadka’s work: the image that simulates reality is cartoon-like and appears to have been generated. The cartoon-like does not remain merely an aesthetic of representation; it becomes an intrusion that destabilizes the status of the real. Pomadka’s masks produce a new, weird spirituality, while a plastic toy is transformed into a relic of Mother Teresa.

If, following Susan Sontag, camp is “a love of the unnatural: of artifice, stylization, and exaggeration,”3 then Pomadka Teresa is its exemplary figure. Yet this would be a naïve way of thinking. Under late capitalism, culture operates as a machine for the continuous production of camp, which ceases to be a minority aesthetic and becomes a generic environment: one composed of filters, generative images, and faces modelled by AI and cosmetic surgery. Camp does not ask what something means or whether it is right, and in this sense it resembles the logic of an algorithm, which does not evaluate content but processes formal patterns. Where tragedy presupposes depth, camp prefers surface; where morality requires judgement, camp chooses aesthetic modulation. Networked structural camp is no longer merely an aesthetic experience but an epistemological one as well: as the dominant perceptual and generative pattern, it constitutes the infrastructure of the contemporary world.

“But the most important part of the face for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates. The grotesque face is essentially reduced to a gaping mouth; everything else is merely a frame around that mouth, around this gaping and devouring bodily abyss.”4 — Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World: A New Translation It is precisely these grotesquely enlarged, unnaturally swollen, and permanently open mouths that condense into a singularity in Pomadka’s work. For Bakhtin, the exaggeration of the mouth is the primary means of shaping the grotesque countenance, the centre of the face’s deformation and disintegration. Pomadka’s masks resemble grotesques torn from the façades of Gothic cathedrals and thrown into algorithmic circulation.5 Medieval representations were fuelled by Christian mythology and folk culture; Pomadka is driven by the memosphere, B movies, science fiction, Terminator, the xenomorph from the Alien franchise, and reality-television databases. The grotesques return as inhabitants of social-media platforms, while the medieval carnival is coupled with a bot farm.

Nick Land defined compression as a process through which capitalist-technological systems reduce time, complexity, and qualitative differences to increasingly dense intensities ready for further circulation.6 Similarly, in Pomadka’s work, images of popular culture are neither quoted nor represented but subjected to vacuum compression. American Beauty, but with the face of late-period Nicole Kidman; The Urbz: Sims in the City, but played from the interface level, where you are constantly keeping the indicators in the red; GTA: San Andreas as a nocturnal open world, except that you mostly play it like Crazy Taxi and run over male hookers; Desperate Housewives, but styled like Vinted, where the clothes have more history than the people; or Quake III Arena, but with an FPS so high that your eyeballs explode. Pomadka sucks all of this into her vortex and compresses it into a single intensity— posthuman pulp.

The algorithm rewards not truth but intensity, difference, and speed. Condensed images circulate, replicate, and mutate, while the face ceases to be a face in the traditional sense. The greater the excess, the greater the chance of dissemination. Instagram and Pomadka jointly produce a machinic process that drives, accelerates, and disperses itself. In this sense, Pomadka’s grotesques become the platform’s inter(faces): grotesque heads with gaping maws, devouring pop culture, multiplying on algorithmic slides, and returning once again to circulation. Pomadka has failed the Turing test because the distinction between human and machine has ceased to matter.

1 Land, N., Fanged Noumena, trans. Patrick Leftwich (Warsaw: Kronos, 2026), essay “Cybergothic.” 2 Fisher, M., The Weird and the Eerie, trans. Anna Karalus and Tomasz Adamczewski (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2023), essay “Out of This World, Out of Time: Lovecraft and the Weird.” 3 Sontag, S., Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2009), essay “Notes on ‘Camp’.” 4,5 Bakhtin, M., Rabelais and His World: A New Translation, trans. S. Sandler (MIT Press, 2025), chapter “The Grotesque Image of the Body in Rabelais and Its Sources.” 6 Patrick Leftwich, “Afterword,” in Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, trans. Patrick Leftwich (Warsaw: Kronos, 2026).