instinct #2027

SURVIVAL INSTINCT

THREE ACTS. ONE SURVIVAL

Instinct is a non-profit, community-based art project. Since 2015, it has given

queer artists a space to exhibit work that doesn’t always find one elsewhere:

pieces that speak to desire, shame, intimacy, and the social pressures

that shape queer lives.

Instinct isn’t curated from a distance. It grows out of we.are.village,

the community it belongs to, and stays answerable to it.

For 2027, Instinct becomes a year- project in three chapters:
INVERSION - HOW ABOUT NEVER - SAME BLOOD

What queer communities inherit, not only freedom,

but shame, fear, and the habits that come with surviving.

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 chapters, the questions stay the ones that matter to this

community directly: how we live together, how we love, how we desire,

and what it costs to doany of 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 word “inversion” to describe homosexuality: a reversal of the natural order, 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 that diagnosis? And 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, into new rules of language, into a consensus that barely tolerates disagreement.

Liberation also came with an accent, an American one. The US model of what it means to be gay has shaped queer people worldwide, often at the expense of local languages, traditions, and ways of living.
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 was never just a private matter. It was always also a response and a provocation: a reply to prohibition, pathologizing, and social control. Cruising, fetish, sex work, excess, these made spaces where bodies escaped the rules of propriety to invent new forms of pleasure, intimacy, and community.
HOW ABOUT NEVER asks a simpler and uncomfortable question: what if all that excess mostly serves to avoid the essential? We push the body to its limits, risk, performance, chemsex, expectations, experiences repeated over and over, encounters that never lead anywhere, precisely to avoid facing what we’re actually looking for: to be chosen, to be loved, to be stayed with.

This avoidance isn’t only individual, it gets passed down. Persecution under Paragraph 175, the silence and grief of the AIDS years, the absence of an entire generation of elders, taught many that it was safer to desire without waiting, to consume without attaching.

It isn’t desire that’s the toxic inheritance, it's what we avoid behind it: to be chosen, to be loved, to be stayed with.

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.
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.