Masculinity is not a state but a process. It is relational, affective, and fragile, prone to fractures and dependent on the gaze of others. The exhibition The Bonner From My Heart treats it as a field of tensions between desire and norm, love and power, corporeality and institutions. In this narrative, masculinity is filtered through failure, shame, and perversions.

For the works presented in the exhibition by Mikołaj Sobotka and Paweł Zięba, shame constitutes a point of departure. In Zięba’s practice, the exposure of desire brings to light what bourgeois provincialism prefers to keep hidden. The artist places the viewer in the role of a voyeur observing casual scenes of intimacy and longing. Arousal, which most of us experience once, twice, three times a day… every hour, resembles a beast with a bottomless stomach to which we offer sacrifices: meme, game, sex — whatever (the suffix porn).

Sobotka approaches the matter quite differently. His blurred drawings, seen through baroque–PRL-style glass, remain partially obscured. The fetish, he seems to suggest, must stay concealed. Reflections reveal a collar, a mask, gloves, a leather belt, a penis pump, or a liquefied brain whose nervous system appears on the verge of explosion. The game of masculinity is not easy; it requires constant adjustment, symbolically echoed in the prefix mask within the English word masculinity.

The exhibition traces a triple trajectory: the path of sexuality from repression to perversion and the path of perversity from alienation to acceptance. The titular boner refers to the film Love Exposure by Sion Sono, in which the protagonist Yo responds with a swelling erection at the sight of Yoko, the girl he falls in love with. For him, it is a sign of the most sincere feelings — love and exclusivity — whereas bourgeois-Christian morality, burdening sexuality with guilt, coats his boner in the grease of sinfulness. For Sobotka and Zięba, the bourgeois home constitutes, on the one hand, a valuable paternal legacy, and on the other, a burden. Zięba deals with this inheritance through a gramophone with a record-drawing resembling the cover of a punk album, or by placing his drawings on a stylish postwar all-in-one coat rack. While paper lends itself to casual scenes of desire, Zięba’s painting carries a more elevated charge, and Art Nouveau–like interiors assume the mystery of film noir, emptiness, and nostalgia. The narrative surrounding Zięba’s world intertwines the necessity of fulfilling the role of masculinity with the experience of disintegration. The bodies of his figures dissolve and fall apart in waves. If the bourgeois father’s home appears as a dystopian fate, the question arises: how can one work with memory and the inheritance of power structures?

While Zięba presents an intimate perspective, Sobotka weaves a web of masculinity by mapping relationships within the public sphere. The same objects — gloves, masks, a belt — operate across different rituals and spaces, symbolizing elegance, hygiene, ceremonial order, uniform, and military discipline. Masks enable the temporary suspension of social roles; in the military and in BDSM contexts they become fetishized, inscribing relations of domination and submission into the dynamics of bodies that derive pleasure from them. The belt, fastening the uniform, becomes a tool of punishment and erotic play, a carrier of violence circulating between the public, domestic, and sexual spheres. The covered face and the distance it produces facilitate the suspension of ethics and the infliction of pain. Sobotka universalizes these symbols, linking them to global structures of power and demonstrating their influence on the formation of masculinity among the wealthiest elites of business, politics, and the military — the form that gender studies scholars describe as hegemonic. Not every man, however, wishes or is able to assume the role of hegemon¹ (Hearn). Men outside the system of power inhabit the margins — the so-called dump. As Michał Grygierczyk argues, the dump turns out to be an attractive place to live². Among rubble and waste, masculine subjectivity can shed its burden and experiment with what its new home — a nomadic landfill — might become.

The suitcase cut open by Sobotka reveals its insides. Inside lies an anime drawing situated at the border of aesthetics such as pantsu shot, ecchi, and moe. The elegant form balances between innocence and perversion, becoming an idiom of bourgeois culture. “Our society is still a bourgeois society”³ — wrote Roland Barthes in the twentieth century. Although the notion of the bourgeoisie may appear outdated today in the face of techno-elite power, it continues to play a role in education, reproducing inequalities and maintaining cultural capital. Some would prefer to throw the baby out with the bathwater — as Bertrand Mandico does in Wild Boys, when the Captain, undertaking an experimental therapy for depraved youths, throws their degenerate books into the sea, while discipline and diet — estrogenic fruits from a mysterious island — are meant to restrain a natural tendency toward violence.

The Bonner From My Heart does not offer simple answers or affirmative narratives about a “new masculinity.” Instead, it reveals fractures, contradictions, and affective costs embedded in the very process of its production. The exhibition makes it possible to observe this game — together with its props, masks, and debris — and to ask what else might happen if…

1Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times, Jeff Hearn;

2Analiza paradygmatu męskości oraz alternatywnych wzorców w XX i XXI wieku na podstawie wybranej literatury polskiej, Michał Grygierczyk;

3Mitologie, Roland Barthes;