Out of Place and Out of Time. Queering the Polish Countryside in the Work of Adam Łucki

The text discusses the work of the Polish artist Adam Łucki in the context of the “rural turn” in queer studies and visual arts. Referring to the notion of “metronormativity” and the American discourse of the “anti-idyll,” I examine how these concepts can be applied to discuss the Polish rural queer experience and cultural constructions of the Polish countryside. In my interpretation of Łucki’s work, I argue that visual practices engaged in queering the countryside work against existing stereotypical perceptions of the rural space as backward and hostile. I also show how, in Łucki’s artistic practice, the countryside as a space and the rural as a temporal construct become symbolically decolonised through a performative queer appropriation.