2023
installation, 100 x 200 cm
acrylic print, aluminium
installation view at Kühlhaus for The Fairest x Berlin Art Week, 2023
NIQAF is an artificial, camp, gothic church, stained-glass window with fake x-rays of the many animals displaying homosexual, queer and trans behaviour, as well as excerpts of the first LGBTQIA+ archive of Germany, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld. In the 1930s, the world knew Hirschfeld as the “Einstein of sex.” The famed German Jewish physician and sexologist ran the „Institut für Sexualwissenschaft“ (Institute for Sexual Science), a library, research centre, and clinic in Berlin. In it, he oversaw the first modern gender confirming surgeries, conducted large-scale studies on homosexuality, and lobbied the government for LGBTQIA+ rights. His library held thousands of books on same-sex relationships, erotica, and gender. When the Nazis came to power, the institute was looted, its library got burned - and another counterarchive of already marginalized and overseen history was lost to dumbass fascists. As Ann Cvetkovich describes it in “The queer art of counterarchive, „ “'The "archive fever" catalyzed by the silencing, neglect, and stigmatization of queer histories is a particularly powerful force, echoing the ferocity and perversity of queer sexual desire. (…)"Queer archive activism" insists that the archive serve not just as a repository for safeguarding objects, but also as a resource that "comes out" into the world to perform public interventions, Some of the best archive activists have been artists, whose creative practices and avowedly personal investments lend themselves to innovative exhibitions that bring the archive to life…“
With the violence against women and queer people on a terrifying rise and the steady dismantling of our human rights worldwide, this work aims to counteract the biologistical pseudo-scientific arguments of Christian conservatives and fascists enforcing their queerphobic ideology of what is and what is not “natural” because of “biology” or religious mythology. ´Cause nature is queer as fuck.
installation, 69 x 192cm at Le Tony, Paris
inkjet print on transparent projector sheet, silicone glue, chrome powder, nail polish
