instinct #2027

SURVIVAL INSTINCT

THREE ACTS. ONE SURVIVAL

Since 2015, Instinct has been a non-profit and community-based art project. Instinct grows out of we.are.village, it’s strongly linked to the community it belongs to, and stays answerable to it.

Instinct has given queer artists a space to exhibit work that one doesn’t always find elsewhere. Pieces that speak to the desire, shame, intimacy, and social pressures that shape queer lives.

For 2027, Instinct initiates a yearlong project in three Acts. Detailing what and how queer communities inherit. That the freedom we live within, also contains the shame, fear and habits alongside surviving.

INVERSION - HOW ABOUT NEVER - SAME BLOOD

A part of the artists shown in 2027 will be selected through an International

Open Call, reviewed by an independent jury, so the program stays open

to voices outside Instinct’s existing network.

Across all three ACTS, the questions stay invested in what matters to
this community directly: how we live together, how we love, how we
desire, and what it costs to do that honestly.

ACT I INVERSION

Liberation. What’s next? 25 March - 15 July 2027
In the 19th century, the emerging science of sexology coined the term "inversion" to describe homosexuality: a reversal of the natural order, and a pathology to be corrected. This first chapter takes the word at its word, and turns it back on itself. What remains after liberation from diagnosis? Is that liberation as complete as the official story claims?

History gets smoothed over. What was contradictory, radical, uncomfortable, still shapes how we desire and live together today.

"Queer" was once an inversion: a slur turned into a weapon. Today that force risks hardening into academic routine, with new rules of language and a consensus that barely tolerates disagreement.

Who decides what is natural? Animals now build their nests from our waste, and we live inside our machines. As artificial intelligence and the cyborg reshape daily life, the old diagnosis of "unnatural" no longer sorts anything.

What if liberation also meant creating spaces for collective healing? Spaces where we come together, draw on the resources present, and find new ways of caring for one another. Where healing is not an individual task, but something we make possible together.

What will queer community become in that future?
curation Instinct curation team together with Monika Popiel & Paweł Świerczek (Stimpathy)

ACT II HOW ABOUT NEVER

Desire Without Delivery 25 August - 15 October 2027

Queer sexuality has never been a private matter. It has always been in response and provocation: a reaction to prohibition, pathology, and social control. Cruising, fetish, sex work, excess, these create spaces where bodies escape the rules of propriety and invent new forms of pleasure, intimacy, and community.

HOW ABOUT NEVER starts from a question we ask ourselves. What if, alongside all that freedom, some of us are also looking for something the excess cannot give? We push the body, we chase intensity, we repeat encounters that lead nowhere, and underneath we may be wishing for the simplest things: to be chosen, to be loved, to be committed. “HOW ABOUT NEVER doesn’t claim an answer. It only asks an honest question. Sometimes, for a few minutes, two strangers reach something close to absolute communion, a moment outside of time. It is real. Why does the most intense closeness we know so often belong to someone who will not stay?

We have never been more connected, and rarely more alone. Every profile is a door, and almost none of them opens. This avoidance is inherited. Persecution under Paragraph 175, the silence and grief of the AIDS years and the consequent absence of an entire generation of elders. This taught many that it was safer to desire without waiting and consume without attaching.

Desire is not a toxic trait, it's what we avoid behind it: to be chosen, to be loved, to be committed.

curation Instinct curation team together with Bruno Podrug

ACT III SAME BLOOD
A new epidemic, same silence 1 November – 1 December 2027

From the death-fear of the 1980s, through the first, often toxic treatments with AZT, to PrEP today, what was once a death sentence became a treatable condition. What medicine couldn’t heal are the traces left behind: grief, guilt, stigma, and a fear that shaped an entire generation.

The AIDS generation lived through a virus that was unpredictable, uncontrollable, unjust. It struck anyone, and it struck no one in particular. Today’s generation faces something that looks nothing like a virus, and yet behaves like one in its own way.

Chemsex doesn’t arrive by chance. It’s chosen, repeated, sought out, and still it reshapes the brain until choice stops feeling like choice.
Some drugs offer that communion on command, and for a few hours they deliver it. Then you wake up in an empty bed, and the sheets hold nothing but the oldest wound, this only.
Then and now, some bodies were put at risk for a few minutes of communion. The risk was never the point, but it became part of the price..
What the two have in common is a harm this community isn't allowed to name, let alone show. SAME BLOOD doesn’t equate the two crises. It also remembers that the AIDS years produced one of the most remarkable forms of collective self-organization queer communities have ever built. Our community has done this before, and it can come together to fight again.