Masculine Gender

"The impulse to create this series came from a fleeting impression I remembered from my teenage years: on a vast, empty square of a concrete housing estate, I passed an unknown man. When our gazes crossed, I realized that I truly knew nothing about masculinity. The nature of the space and the content of that impression were, as I now believe, mutually conditioned. To this day, I do not know what this widespread state of bewilderment is, nor the uncertainty with which men themselves define their own identity. In the place where I live, a deeper debate on heteronormative masculinity is only just beginning. The burden of the oppressive consequences that patriarchy has imposed on culture does not encourage reflection on the obvious fact that these consequences also affect the majority of men. The oppressiveness of male value systems permeates the space around us, shapes our everyday gestures, and leaves its mark in subtle ways within established law. Despite my personal disagreement with this state of affairs, and without rancor or recourse to ideology, I carried out a private experiment—testing how attentively I am able to register moments in which, in space or in the male figures I encounter, I sense a source of pain and oppression similar to my own. I wanted to remain as open as possible to the complexity of the phenomenon and, through images, to stay in contact with intuition". [Artur Pławski]