Performance BASTARD BATH

17.10.2026, 20:00 — in the space of the exhibition “self-opening”

Bastard Bath — a performative duo formed by Kuba Stępiegne (guitar, synthesizers, vocals) and Maja Gajewicz (drums), which breaks down and reinvents the concept of female transgression through the raw power of experimental metal. Combining noise, abrasive guitar textures, blast-fueled percussion, and shattered genre tropes — from trappy rhythms to icy, oversaturated mourning lyrics—Bastard Bath becomes a sonic meditation on survival, anger, and radical self-disclosure. Violent and at the same time full of fragility, their performances exist in the space between decay and catharsis, confronting tenderness with the extreme.

Maja Gajewicz — a Warsaw-based drummer working on the borderline of experimental music, metal and noise. Her playing combines intense rhythmic structures, dense cymbal sounds and rapid dynamic changes, drawing inspiration from the works of artists such as Greg Fox and Valentina Magaletti. He explores extreme sound as a form of both musical and embodied expression, treating it as a space of inner transformation and shared emotional experience.

Kuba Stępièn (she/her) is an artist working between Berlin, Warsaw and her hometown of Bełchatów. Her artistic practice is based on a broadly understood process with a strong emphasis on experimental research, emotional criticism, self-theory and trans-non-binary perspective. In their work, they use video, performance, sound, painting, their own bodily fluids and other media, tools and materials that may be perceived as irrational or frivolous. Often operating within the framework of performative activities, she works with her own body, the collective body, the understanding of multiplicity beyond her own trauma and the construction of queer worlds. Working between the media, the artist transfunds them to each other, seeking to explore concepts of indeterminacy that absorb fictions and fantasies in relation to visual representation — as an alternative to dream dreams. Questioning normative communication standards and binary orders, he explores the potentials of non-normativity and subjective poetic language, treating his work as visual poems, codes or representations.

photo by karol grygoruk edit cuba steppe

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