poptimism
25. 7. 25, 7 p.m.

Greta Rainbow is a Canadian-American writer living in New York. Her essays, criticism, interviews, and fiction have appeared in The Believer, Cleveland Review of Books, The Guardian, Hobart Pulp, Los Angeles Review of Books, SSENSE, and Vulture, among others. She is an editor at The Creative Independent, anchor contributor to the books newsletter Blank, and a contributing art critic at New York Review of Architecture. Her prized possessions include a Byzantine oil lamp tattoo, a first edition of Adrienne Salinger's Teenagers in their Bedrooms, and her family's cat named Jack Kerouac.

Esben Weile Kjær (*1992, Copenhagen) is an artist based in Copenhagen. Spanning sculpture, video and performance, Esben Weile Kjær's work draws on the history of pop culture and pop music to investigate themes of nostalgia, authenticity, and generational anxiety. In an attentive though reckless visual language, he investigates today’s event economy, often focusing on marketing tactics and the aesthetics of the entertainment industry – mainly to consider art’s relationship to its surrounding culture industries. As such, his work attempts to not only mimic other cultural modes of performance (such as those found in parties, protests, press conferences, and ballets), but to become performative pop culture in its own right—often through interventions in public and commercial spaces, using props such as podiums, confetti cannons, fences, and party lasers.

Jakub Gawkowski is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Central European University, Vienna, and Chief Curator at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. His recent curatorial projects include Records of Waiting: On Time and Ornament (with Monika Rosińska and Maciej Siuda, London Design Biennale, 2025), Wacław Szpakowski. Riga Notebooks (with Inga Lāce and Daniel Muzyczuk, Latvian National Museum of Art, 2023), and Erna Rosenstein, Aubrey Williams. The Earth Will Open Its Mouth (Muzeum Sztuki, 2022). He was a fellow of EHRI- European Holocaust Research Infrastructure and DAAD TheMuseumLabs program. His essays and interviews have appeared in e-flux and various exhibition catalogues. He serves on the program council of QueerMuzeum Warszawa.