Despite what was constantly said about God having no gender, he was still, in our guesses, masculine. Petra Genetrix is the mother rock that begat Mithras, the youthful god of sun. She was neither father nor mother. And yet, when I think of her, I feel an unmistakably predominant female presence (it seems natural to surmise femininity in a begetting rock). This is the first story of creaturely asexuality that I have enjoyed such a suggestion.

Exhibition PETRA GENERTIX is about pleasure, experienced, felt and communicated by female and male artists. Above all, the project explores the dimension of primitiveness (in the sense of the purity of direct experience) as well as recalling the sphere of contact with/ contact through the body. The works on display will evoke narratives involving Great Mothers and Wild Mothers. These are immortal heroines who continue to manifest themselves in our world through femininity. Representatives of a wide spectrum of modes of existence and self-expression, forces both creating and destroying, drawn from the shadows or illuminated by an aura of sanctity.

As a curator and, incidentally, a man, I would like to create an open space in which creation is freely realised. My role is, above all, to actively observe and look into those places that I cannot reach through my own limitations. At the same time, my 'framing' of this artistic activity seems important.

As Robert Bly wrote in his book Iron John, femininity is as infinite as the ocean or sunlight, and at the same time lends itself to being captured, enclosed sometimes in women's bodies, sometimes in men's bodies. Each such body, however, contains only a taste of the ocean, the scent of the sea.

The author rightly observes that something strange has happened ... in today's world we use the expressions 'heavenly father' and 'mother-earth', forgetting the phrases heavenly mother and father-earth. The pleasure dealt with in the exhibition is therefore also an expression of the male fascination with the unknowable sphere, a merging of imagination with real experience, an attempt at naming. It seems important to find the parts that contain a taste of the whole, for femininity becomes a word that acquires meaning through variation by a multiplicity of instances. We are never total emergent beings, uncompromisingly balanced. We have within us water and fire, sun and moon, femininity and masculinity. We learn to live between these opposites and find ourselves in the exciting space in between. And this is extremely enjoyable.

Tekst: Max Radawski