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AS A WAY OF LIFE
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The photographer Rüdiger Trautsch from Hamburg, who died in autumn 2021, is the most important chronist of the gay and later also the queer movement in Germany. His work (his bequest is in the archives of the Schwules Museum) includes images of the first gay protest marches in Münster and West Berlin in the 1970s through to the last pre-coronavirus Folsom events in Berlin. In between there are celebrity shots of Warhol and Mapplethorpe, pictures of the legendary Hamburg house club Front, of bear parties, as well as his drag and couple series. Trautsch’s pictures are somewhere between documentation and art. They are indispensable illustrative material for queer historiography in Germany, but his work also offers moving individual images that reflect a very special relationship to his subject. The exhibition Photography as a Way of Life presents an overview of the five decades of Trautsch’s work and places one motif at the centre: for photographer Rüdiger Trautsch, the camera was much more than just an instrument, it was an opportunity to make contact with people. In Rüdiger Trautsch’s life, photography became not only a cultural practice, but also a social one: taking photographs to make friends.
AS A WAY OF LIFE
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Intimacy is one of the central topics in queer art – creating a distinctive relationship between public and private expression. Even though it can be risky for queer minorities to make their intimate relations public, new forms and versions of intimacy have constantly evolved, especially in Berlin: people finding ecstasy on the dancefloor, adventure in the darkroom, tenderness in their polyamorous relationships, and much more.
These realities are framed by medial and pharmacological developments. The digitization left its marks , as well as the medical narratives of HIV/AIDS – all the way to the current Covid 19 pandemic. The exhibition “Intimacy” presents over 30 positions of queer contemporary art discussing these topics: photography, painting, sculptures, video installations and film.
Featuring artworks from Sholem Krishtalka, Rafael Medina, Del LaGrace Volcano, Elijah Burgher, Abel Burger, Simon Fujiwara, Slava Mogutin, AA Bronson, John Paul Ricco, Eva Giannakopoulou, Marlon Riggs, Michaela Melián, Vika Kirchenbauer, Doron Langberg, Kerstin Drechsel, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Clifford Prince King, Derrick Woods-Morrow, Emerson Ricard, Victor Luque, Spyros Rennt, Irma Joanne, Lucas Foletto Celinski, Florian Hetz, Zanele Muholi, Tejal Shah, Roey Victoria Heifetz, Annie Leibovitz, Donna Huanca, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Studio P-P, George Le Nonce, Josch Hoenes and Tomka Weiß.
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The cabinet of curiosities exploded! In spring and summer 2020, the Schwules Museum will turn the spotlight on its own collection. Following the example of the British Museum’s successful exhibit “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” we present the richness, diversity and fascination of our collection in 100 selected objects. This uncompromisingly queer collection – ranging from photographs to drag costumes, documents to paintings, books from 1629 to contemporary artistic positions – stands in for our collection of 1.5 million archival objects.
In recent years, the Schwules Museum has taken decisive steps towards presenting a more diverse program. This year, we begin to reflect on how these interventions have affected and will continue to affect how our collections: how we see them, understand them, and present them.
How can we queer what has been traditionally a very gay collection? How do we celebrate our holdings, and the great importance they have for so many in our community, and simultaneously think them critically and open them up to ways of think ways of thinking and knowing?
“100 Objects” presents our collections in a new way: not arranged according to specific identities or historical eras, but according to affects, or feelings. What does an object make us feel? How did its creators feel? Its original audiences?
Affects are difficult to localize. Forms of experience and knowledge that transcend familiar categories for conveying histories and experiences, they set our self-image and our history in motion.
These questions open up new ways of understanding our collections – from new acquisitions in art to classic Berlin drag costumes, and everything in between. This affective look at our collection brings to light objects and connections between objects that might otherwise escape chronologically and hierarchically ordered historiographies. It highlights singularities and new horizons, and discovers coincidences that open new doors to the world of queer things.
What affects, emotions, or feelings can be used to evoke queer lifeworlds? Is there a characteristic “queer” feeling? The psychologist Sylvan Tomkins once suggested that human behavior could be understood through eight or nine basic affects. Starting from this idea, we organize this exhibition around five crossing paths: desire, joy, care, anger, and fear.
This affective approach to our hundred objects means we remain open to surprises, to stories that have not yet been written down. This presentation is necessarily incomplete. It is an experiment, and an invitation to our visitors to experience queer history in all its vividness, and to rewrite it and to dream it forward.
