Exhibition MATING MANUAL

Artist: Agnieszka Grodzińska

Women’s Time Foundation Gallery, Poznań, Poland

Dates: 06.06–29.08.2025 

Curators: Jagna Domżalska, Ola Pietrzak

What is social order, and how is it constructed? To look for answers, we must take a system of state management of the lives of citizens into consideration. One of them is related to reproduction, and in the following, sexuality. What helps keep these areas in check are schemes. Repetitive, unifying, commonplace, and, above all, disciplinary.

Each country has a long-term demographic strategy that aims to increase the fertility rate. Hormonal health and reproduction policies are set, which are part of society management. Their consequences are measurable standards – statistic, charted and tabulated. Therefore, biological limitations, real possibilities, or needs that do not fit established patterns are rejected and considered as unquantifiable. The state’s organisms run the organisms of individuals. However, the consequences of these management strategies are felt by each one individually, on their own bodies.

Agnieszka Grodzińska looks at social choreographies, their teaching methods, and knowledge development. Her research material consists of instructions on sexual partnerships, guides, textbooks, educational boards and diagrams, published by various socialist countries. Reaching for the technique of reproduction and image transformation, she reflects on the imposed reproductive models.

The opening artwork – “Mating Manual” – is made in Grodzińska’s characteristic artistic-archival technique, using found materials transformed through various graphic techniques using photocopying. The graphic balances on the edge of figuration and abstraction—at the end it is a visual charade. Bodies interpermeate, overlap, and fade into deep red, becoming difficult to distinguish. Their aim is to show in a schematic and instructional way the sexual act, which is devoid of individual characteristics. The censored image taken from a manual, processed by the artist, allows us to recognize the issue of social reproduction imposed by the states.

A reflection of the social order, its pillar, is a column-shaped steel structure. Regardless of times and contexts, this figure symbolizes stability. In this context, the necessity of reproduction can be understood as the foundation of societies. The phrases, which appear on the column as well as on the other works, open selected chapters of reflection on the contemporary field of state social reproduction. They redirect our attention to uncomfortable positions and processes that we were accustomed to treating as liberties and private before the politics of reproductive education or class genetics were on our horizon.

The next object – “Hunger Logic” – on the other hand, brings to mind a kind of griddle and, at the same time, a child’s carousel hung over the cot. Grodziśska evokes the threat of hunger and the need for food as an atavistic catalyst for family building. Today, however, the problem lies, as the artist points out, more in the ways of acting around feeding than in the necessity of feeding itself.

Grodzińska looks not only at the language that formats female and male citizens but also at the symbols and logos of family planning associates. The color in which the exhibition is set is particularly important. It can be found in the instructions we use everyday. As Derek Jarman rightly pointed out, color is one of the most intense stimuli. It affects not only sight but can also have texture, smell, temperature, or political power. These contexts materialize in the installation “Whatever Happens, Never Drop A Baby”

– a cold steel structure, marked by key words, and a collection of xerographic collages. Encapsulated in the form of a spatial diagram, they create the illusion of an orderly and disciplined reality.

The question, then, is not how to make a baby, but who is saying how it should be made, and in what way. And why is this keep saying.

Curatos: Jagna Domżalska i Aleksandra Pietrzak