Intimacy - Schwules Museum Berlin

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Drop Scene Study (0X5A1099) (2018)
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and DOCUMENT Gallery, Chicago

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is an African-American photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work deals with queerness and Blackness, the relation between different gazes, and the relationship between artist and subject. Fingers have left smudged traces on the mirror. The Black hand on the camera releases the shutter, captures these traces, changes them through an imprint of light into a new trace, which is causally connected to the object. Indexical icons. The “that is how it was”^[1] of photography. The hand in the image, a fragment of the body visible between the black velvet curtain. It arouses a longing to see more of what is concealed. The hand on the camera, which peeks out between the curtain, reflected in the smudged mirror, framed by the curtains in front of the mirror. The curtain is duplicated in the photograph, it emerges from the background of the studio into the foreground. Sepuya reveals the process of creating the photograph, does away with the distance between the medium and the act of making it, and thus creates intimacy.

Clifford Prince King

Untitled (2018)
Inkjet print

The African-American photographer Clifford Prince King lives and works in Los Angeles. In his photographs, he explores Black male queer identities by documenting intimate, everyday moments and meetings between his friends and lovers. Untitled is a collaboration with Paul Mpagi Sepuya for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and addresses similar themes to Sepuya’s Drop Scene Study. The photographic studio is, once again, reflected as the scene of events, comes to the foreground with the black velvet curtain, while smudges make the mirror visible. A blurred hand in the foreground, a direct reflection of the real hand. The two men behind it are photographed mirror images, as the smudges reveal. Mirror and curtain manipulate the perspective. Curtain, hands, arms and cameras divide the self-portrait, draw attention to the setting of the shooting, reflect it as a ceaseless intimate process of negotiation between artists, subjects, spectators, and the work itself.

Derrick Woods-Morrow

‘Watching you watch us, but caring less…’ (studio portrait of us in 2018. LA, California) (2018-2019)
Inkjet print

Derrick Woods-Morrow lives and works in Chicago. The Afro-American artist and activist explores sexual identity and sensual deviation from heterosexual norms through photography, film/video, performance, and ceramic. Untitled is a cooperation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and addresses similar themes to Sepuya’s Drop Scene Study. Photographs of white people to the left of the Black subjects, who are taking photographs in the smudged studio mirror, a modern triptych. Photography is a medium of reproduction which is inherently shaped by racism. In the 1950s, Kodak established pale skin as the chemical baseline of analogue film technology.^[2] The white gaze dominates photographic discourse. A young, thin white woman, the toned torso of a white man, the black photographer in the middle shoot through this narrative with their cameras and record themselves in the intimate setting of the studio, delivering an alternative photographic discourse.

Emerson Ricard

Untitled (2018)
Inkjet print

Emerson Ricard is an American photographer who lives and works in New York. His photographs show queer people in forests, on beaches, and in other natural settings. Untitled was created in the same context as the works mentioned above, but is it a portrait of Sepuya. Framed between two unfocused, pale surfaces? Sepuya looks directly into the camera aimed at him, his own in hand, poised to shoot back. Light and shadow fall on him. Ricard is white, his gaze is unmarked. Sepuya is Black, his gaze is marked. In Woods-Morrow’s, King’s and Sepuya’s photographs, the Black artists were both the photographed and the photographers, they looked at and captured themselves in the mirror. Now Ricard looks at Sepuya, without a mirror to return his gaze. But Sepuya returns the gaze, looks directly at the spectator, and draws their attention to their own gaze.

John Paul Ricco

Blue Black Intimacy (2020)
Andrei Pora (editing), video poem, 4′ 57”

John Paul Ricco is an art historian and queer theorist at the University of Toronto. He researches, teaches, and writes on gender, sexuality, pornography, and questions of intimacy and ways of being together. The Oscar-winning 2016 film Moonlight from director Barry Jenkins depicts protagonist Chiron in three stages, as a child, a teenager, and an adult. In childhood he lives with his mother, a heroin addict, in an underprivileged housing project in Miami. He is viciously bullied, but he does not know why. Even his mother says that he is different, “too soft”. He grows into a shy, thin teenager and experiences sex for the first time with Kevin, a school friend. As an adult, Chiron is big and strong, and he has traded his soft nature for that of a tough drug dealer. He trained his body into an armour of muscles, but his melancholy eyes look to the floor. Ricco’s reading of the film concentrates on touch and the affective plane between Chiron and Kevin. For Ricco, this narrative of intimacy is important, because it is not about identification or knowledge.

Queer Zines

The medium of the zine – small-format brochures, often made by fans for fans – was frequently used to develop a queer aesthetic of intimacy, as distinguished from pornographic glamour. A new generation of queer zines has emerged since the 2000s: Butt, Kink, Dude, Original Plumbing, and The Tenth. They can be read as a kind of critique of pornography, because they contrast the objectification of the body through the rigorous application of pornographic conventions with an aesthetic of intimacy closer to amateur photography. It is no coincidence that the popularity of the internet gained momentum around 2000. With it, an abundance of images of diverse, non-normative bodies began to circulate: an archive the zines could draw on. However, the medium of the zine is intimate in itself: it is not a commercially printed publication that has to conform to marketing guidelines, but a medium which establishes contact between fans and lovers via images and texts.

Zanele Muholi

Julia and “Mandoza“ Hokwana, Lakeside, Johannesburg (2007)
Gelatin silver print

Musa Ngubane and Mabongi Ndlovu, Hillbrow, Johannesburg (2007)
Nomsa Mazibuko and Fondo, outside the Hope Unity Metropolitan Community Church, a gay church, during Good Friday, Mayfair, Johannesburg (2007)
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg (2007)
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg (2007)
C-prints
Courtesy the artist and STEVESON gallery, Cape Town

Zanele Muholi is well-known for their photographic activism in South Africa. In their work, they document the lives of Black South African LGBTQI+ people and call attention to discrimination. Muholi offers the viewer intimate glimpses into the everyday life of their subjects. The nose in the hollow between shoulder and head, the arm around the waist, the hand on the breast or thigh, washing and grooming together. The home as a classic private space. One’s home is like an extension of the self; this is where we keep personal objects, this is where our bed stands, this is where we dream and cry. Hannah Arendt describes the private sphere as a part of modern society which functions as the sphere of the intimate, and includes family life as well as emotional and sexual relationships.^[3] Queer people, as Muholi depicts them, occupy family life and sexual relationships in a new way. Through the prism of alternative forms of the family and cohabitation, sexual relationships which do not conform to the societal cis-heterosexual moral conception of biological reproduction become visible.

Sholem Krishtalka

Nocturne (2019)
Bed III (2020)
Oil on canvas

Sholem Krishtalka is a Canadian illustrator and author. His works are inspired by his experiences in Berlin. His paintings tell stories of loneliness, intimacy, and everyday encounters – in full, strong colours. Enjoying the sun side by side, with closed eyes. Sometimes words are unnecessary between two people. A glance at a mobile phone, one leg enveloped by a pink sheet that creases dramatically. Another glance at a mobile phone, the gateway to the world? Alone in bed with messages from a loved (or desired) one. The display lights up, to not be alone in those same pink sheets, or to watch the happiness of others, lonely and yearning. Two bodies mirrored. One with a thumb on the circle as a symbol for releasing the shutter, capturing the reflection as a memory. The mobile phone as a modern extension of the body, which encroaches on intimate life in varying ways, all captured in Krishtalka’s brushstrokes.

Spyros Rennt

Leg grab, Berlin (2018)
Hanging out at Ludo’s, Berlin (2020)
Coming down, Berlin (2019)
Jos and I at the after, Berlin (2020)
Pigment prints

Spyros Rennt primarily utilises analogue photography. His subjects include portraits and the documentation of intimate social situations. His photographs offer intimate glimpses into the queer underground of Berlin and other metropolises. Four pairs of naked legs close together, a bottom adorned with welts. A sunken head, arms, legs, hands intertwined, which body starts where? Tattoos, curling dark body hair, a hand that glides under loose sport shorts. Sex in a trio, with socks on. Together as a pair, a trio, a multitude. A deep sweaty hug on the dance floor, a hand rests lovingly on the head of the embraced one. A “raw tenderness” pervades Spyros Rennt’s images. Raw tenderness, intimacy in private living rooms, rented rooms, and public clubs. Intimacy includes the way in which people encounter each other. In his memoirs, the African-American gay science fiction author, and literary critic Samuel R. Delany describes the sex between men at former cruising spots, like the docks of Christopher Street, as not only sexual, but also a form of taking care of each other and being there for other people in an exceedingly human, tender, and loving way.^[4]

Abel Burger

Devil want my Soul (2020)
Wax crayon and charcoal on paper

Abel Burger is a painter who lives and works between France and Berlin. Since 2018, she has concentrated on portraits of individuals and dealt with questions of intimacy. Embraces are much more than fleeting touches. Sometimes they are nearly as intimate as a kiss. To take someone in one’s arms. In one’s arms. To be in-the-arms creates a connection, we feel the body of our counterpart, perceive the smell. In the time of the pandemic, it is peculiar to increasingly refrain from hugging. The figure on the right hugs the one on the left from the side, the arms rest on breast and back, and meet again at the shoulder height of the other. It hugs the other figure, but also itself. The colours are intensified in the fauvist style, red tones dominate. It is an intimate embrace. It is not the nakedness that expresses intimacy, but rather how the faces of the figures are inclined towards each other, the left figure touches the right lightly on the arm, they are almost intertwined.

Del LaGrace Volcano

Matt & Eric, Seattle (1996)
Harry Carry Simon, London (1999)
Aludibond Digital print on Baryt paper, aluminium Dibond

Del LaGrace Volcano is an American genderqueer intersex artist, activist, performer, and photographer, and sees themselves as a “part-time gender terrorist”. LaGrace Volcano understands their own body as an archive. Their photography concerns deviations from gender norms, the materiality of bodies, and gender as a construct. LaGrace Volcano’s works reveal the performative nature of social and biological sex, and the intimate embodiment of these categories. In their photography projects, they represent and situate intersex, queer, and trans people as subjects: the images are created in a context of belonging, desire, and identification between the photographer and the photographed. This practice provides alternative perspectives on bodies, couple configurations, sexual practices, and queer people as sexual subjects with agency – free from cis-heteronormative concepts and boundaries.

Slava Mogutin

iO Tillett Wright and Daryl Nuhn, New York (2013)
Xevi Muntané and Carlos Sáez, New York (2013)
Polaroid set of four type PX 70 prints

Dylan and Isaac, Riis Beach (2019)
Lisa and Luisa, Berlin (2019)
Léon and Samuel, Berlin (2020)
Polaroid set of four type 600 prints

Slava Mogutin is a Russian-American multimedia artist and author, who left Russia for New York in 1995 as a result of political persecution. His works deal with, among other things, themes such as displacement and identity, and the transgression and transfiguration of masculinity and queer sexualities. The models pose sweetly and playfully, softly and a little flirtatiously. Tensed biceps, pursed lips, dreamy gazes. Dylan and Isaac, Lisa and Luisa and Léon and Samuel are from the photo series “Polaroid Rage”, which tells the individual stories of the subjects in narrative form. The photographs were taken over the last two years in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. iO Tillett Wright and Daryl Nuhn and Xevi Muntané and Carlos Sáez are part of the series “Instant Portraits”, in which Mogutin documents his circle of friends and New York artists. It is pleasant to look at these sweet couples. However, questions arise about the prioritisation of two-person relationships within intimacy.

Eva Giannakopoulou

At the Beach 2 (2017)
Two-channel video, experimental documentary, 27′ 37” and 10′ 41”

Eva Giannakopoulou is a Greek artist and performer who lives and works in Athens. She has performed and exhibited her work in museums, institutes, and galleries, at festivals, on impromptu stages, and in other public, at times unusual, places. Giannakopoulou takes the viewer to turquoise-blue glittering water – with radiant sunshine, a clear blue sky, a soft breeze, heterosexual couples and families. Regular beaches are conservative places, places which only allow heterosexual public intimacy, but holidays are meant to be relaxing, not a continuation of discrimination in another setting. For this reason, holiday travel is, for queer people, often associated with intensive research in advance. Is this place to some degree LGBTQI+-friendly? Queer families are particularly at risk, because alternative concepts of family and parenthood are seen as a direct assault on the heterosexual nuclear family. Giannakopoulou understands tourism as a normative factor in summer holidays, and thus creates a setting in which parenthood can be reimagined as a matrix, in which roles and identities are subject to open and constant negotiation.

Roey Victoria Heifetz

The Envious ones (2016-2017)
Pencil, ink and lacquer on paper
Steinle Collection Berlin

The Israeli artist Roey Victoria Heifetz employs images of strong and elderly women in her Berlin studio in order to represent the painful discrepancy between social expectations and the bodily reality of growing older as a woman. Deep wrinkles and furrows, age spots, shrunken eyes. A hopeful look upwards, a resigned look to the side. Mountains of rugged hands. They almost look like they have been carved out of wood. They are drawn from life, in pencil and ink. Mainstream media and pop culture are slowly beginning to show an increasing number of images of queer people, but older queer people are mostly excluded, especially trans people. Heifetz’ expressive large format portraits of hyper-present trans women are inspired by her observations of elderly women in public and her own self-portraits. She explores the intimate psychological and emotional question of what aging means for trans women.

Annie Leibovitz

Alf Bold im Auguste-Viktoria-Krankenhaus, Berlin (1992)
Silver gelatin print on Baryt Paper
SMU

Film scholar Alf Bold (1946-1993) was involved in the Berlinale and organised the program of the Arsenal cinema in Schöneberg for over 20 years, before it moved to Potsdamer Platz. That is where he met the queer photographers Nan Goldin and Annie Leiboviz. Both of them photographed Bold in hospital and documented his HIV infection. Alongside Jürgen Baldiga’s self-portraits, these are some of the most vivid testimonies of living and dying with HIV and AIDS at the beginning of the ‘90s in Berlin. Annie Leibovitz, Susan Sonntag’s partner of many years, photographed Alf Bold on his sickbed. The moment is intimate, but Bold’s gaze and stance remain challenging, almost distant. The body, drawn with sickness, presents itself confidently. It seems unafraid in the face of approaching death. Bold did not reconcile with his heterosexual relatives, nor return to the bosom of his family, as the photographs in the Benetton advertising campaign from that time show. His death, like his life, belongs to him.

Marlon Riggs

Anthem (1991)
Video, 9′

Marlon Riggs was an African-American filmmaker and activist. His documentary films are regarded as aesthetically innovative. Their representation of race and sexuality was provocatively received. His film Tongues Untied created nationwide controversy, as the film was intended to be shown on public television and was partially financed with state art funds. Black fingers glide into a pot of Vaseline, a pink triangle flies into the frame, a golden crucifix flickers like a broken neon sign, candles shine, a red rose appears. The images are layered one above the other. Every kiss a revolution in black, green, red – the colours of Pan-Africanism. Through image, sound, symbolism, and montage, Anthem politicises sex, intimacy and love between Black gay men and criticises the societal approach to AIDS and the machismo of the Black Power movement. Other gay Black artists read extracts from their poems or provide voiceovers. Riggs already knew about his AIDS diagnosis when he began working on Anthem, and he would succumb to the disease in 1994.

Michaela Melián

Silvia Bovenschen und Sarah Schumann (2012)
3-channel video and audio installation, 60′

Michaela Melián is a German artist, musician (F.S.K.) and professor of time-based media at the HfbK Hamburg. In her works, she combines art objects with sound, moving through the fields of visual arts and music, such as a brief, immersive visit with Sarah Schumann and Silvia Bovenschen. The feminist painter and feminist author lived together in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Schumann was active in the women’s group “Bread + Roses” and produced many portraits of Bovenschen and likenesses of other women. One hangs on the mint green wall behind the two women. In Älter werden, Bovenschen analysed the transience of human life. She also wrote several texts about Schumann. The ladies sit gracefully in front of the painting, surrounded by books. Intellectual and stylish; Bovenschen dandy-esque in pinstripe trousers and brogues, Schumann in a pleated skirt and sneakers. A discussion between the two on the visibility of women in art history – to which both of them have undoubtedly contributed, with their works and feminist engagement – sounds from another channel.

Josch Hoenes und Tomka Weiß

Die Schichten der geschlechtlichen Kleidung (2013-2020)
Ink, Backlit foil

Queer theory teaches that gender identity acquires its impact through clothing, style and the interpretation of the body itself. Labelling practices and semiotic systems produce meaning surrounding the body, for example by assigning gender significance to particular characteristics of the body. How can we escape this corset of normative attributions? The academic Josch Hoenes (1972-2019) and the artist Tomka Weiß – both were also active as trans* activists – respond to this question with their shared artistic practice: depictions of clothed and naked body parts and fragments of text on transparent film interact with each other. It is as if they first mutually generate each other, and then cause each other to disappear again. Depending on light and perspective, this creates new, intimate, configurations. Gender has historically been construed by the human sciences as a fundamental, fixed category. Here, an alternative conception is created: “humanness” is not symbolically represented by a rigid archetype of gender. On the contrary: it appears over and over again in different ways, through the movement and superimposition of body images and textual knowledge.

Simon Fujiwara

Study for My Martyrs I-VI (a Mural) (2020)
Six mixed media collages and charcoal drawings
Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Simon Fujiwara is a British-Japanese artist who lives in Berlin. His works include video art, paintings, performances, and installations. Among other things, the body of work considers societal and individual structures of identity. In some of his works, he considers the history of syphilis, but Study for My Martyrs I-VI (a Mural) is about AIDS. The distinctive blue curtain ripples marvellously on the floor. In hospital, it is often the only protector of privacy. The emaciated hands are crossed over the breast, the wrists so thin that the wristwatch slips down, the face gaunt. A teddy bear and balloons, to relieve the distress of the hospital room. These details from the hospital photographs are drawn on to the arches of a print of Notre-Dame cathedral, which is consecrated to Mary, the “mother of mercy”. And yet, the thousands affected by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s never received such mercy from the Catholic church… quite the contrary.

AA Bronson

Blue (in collaboration with Ryan Brewer), Fire Island (2012)
Duratrans transparency in lightbox
Courtesy the artists and Esther Schipper, Berlin

AA Bronson is a Canadian artist who lives in Berlin. In 1969, he founded the art collective General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. His works deal with AIDS, genealogy, spirits, healing, and shamanism. The colourful figures almost look mounted in the image, but at the same time, fit in well with the mystical sandy pine forest. The forest, a place of extremely varied rituals: Cherry Grove and the Pines, the LGBTQI+ communities on Fire Island in the state of New York, have been a queer travel destination for 60 years. During the AIDS epidemic, many people went to this place to live out their last days with dignity. AA Bronson (blue figure with white beard) and his partner Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur (blue figure with black beard) scattered the ashes of those who died of AIDS here. This place is full of queer history and stories, spirits, queer life and afterlife, and intimate encounters between the living and the dead.

Doron Langberg

Zach and Craig (2019)
Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Doron Langberg was born in Israel and lives in New York. His large format oil paintings always feature dramatic colour and brushwork, they are emotionally and erotically charged, and they immediately command our full attention. We see pairs of men, pairs of women, or groups of friends in their lounges and bedrooms before, during, or after sex. The reference to sexuality is at times subtle, and at times extreme. Zach and Craig (2019) shows a pair of gay lovers rimming. Rimming – oral stimulation of the anus – can be foreplay for anal sex, or in itself the apex of the sex act. This, by rights, pornographic scene gains transcendental power in Langberg’s representation. That is it worth dying for sex is a thought that Michel Foucault and Leo Bersani discuss in queer theory. When we see Doron Langberg’s pictures, we understand what is meant. There are moments that are worth living or dying for.

Elijah Burgher

The Perineum is the Door! (2018-2019)
Acrylic on canvas drop cloth

Horny Sun Salute (2019)
Green Galatea (2019)
Cumface Crowley (2018)
The Lover’s Entombment (2019)
Ink and bleach on inkjet print

The American painter Elijah Burgher produces large-scale images of sigils. The practice of the artist, who lives in Berlin, is strongly influenced by his interest in magic, esotericism, and occultism. In sigil magic, a wish or desire is formulated. The letters are then rearranged to transform it into a graphic symbol, the sigil. A visual code of intimate desire and longing in red, lilac, and mint green, painted on a large canvas drop cloth. A portable base for rituals. Sigils have to be activated to become magical. This is done by thinking about them in an intimate moment, like orgasm. Because the work lies on the floor, we view it in a more intimate context than the usual reverent distance from a framed artwork on a white wall. The viewer can look at the visualisation of Burgher’s wish, but will ultimately never know for sure what his desire is. The zine Sperm Cult, which Burgher made with Richard Hawkins, also focuses on rituals, occultism, magic and sex.

Del LaGrace Volcano

Scott’s Bar, Charmaine & Velinda, San Francisco (1982)
Hermaphrodyké: Self Portraits of Desire, With Beard, London (1995)
Hermaphrodyké: Self Portraits of Desire, Begging Please, London (1995)
Digital prints on Baryt paper

Studio P–P

Marble House, Berlin (2020)
Carnivore, Stockholm (2018)
Bettnässer, Berlin (2020)
Head, Berlin (2019)
Pigment prints

Philipp Gallon and Pär Ålander are the visual artists behind Studio P–P. The couple live and work in Berlin, and, in their intimate self-portraits, deal with questions of queer identity and sex and body positivity. The relationship between sex and power is always ambiguous. In The Will to Knowledge, Michael Foucault writes that sexuality is not outside of power, but within it.^[5] Sex is not “the most natural thing in the world”; like gender, it is constructed. Sex too is a form of exercising power over others. Questions arise about the availability of bodies, dominance, submission, and the influence of socio-political power structures on one’s own sex. But sex can also be a path to self-empowerment. This is what Studio P–P’s photographs draw on. They are about seizing power, experimenting with different roles and practices, and consciously sharing these sensual, intimate moments with the outside world.

Lucas Foletto Celinski

Fixation / double braided #1 (2017)
Linen, cotton cord, satin strap, steel

The Brazilian artist Lucas Foletto Celinski uses bondage and restraint methods in his sculptures to investigate boundaries and initiate dialogue about the representation of bodies. He lives in Berlin. The thin black cords cover the thick, heavy white cords like a pattern. Hanging from leather straps, rings, and thin ropes, they float in suspension bondage. Pleasure and pain are not necessarily opposites, they can intersect and overlap like the thick white ropes, become pleasurable pain. Dominance, submission, free surrender of power, and autonomy. Entrusting another person with body, spirit, fantasies, and one’s own wishes. Constant communication, consent, attending closely to reactions, carrying out rituals together. Getting to know one’s own body with the help of other people, finding and clearly naming one’s own boundaries and the access to one’s own body. Is BDSM ultimately not a sexual preference, but an intimate practice?

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos

Hardcore Cuddling I (2020)
Video, 10′ 10”

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos is an interdisciplinary Brazilian artist who works with video, painting, performance, and sculpture. They live in Berlin and concentrate on the deconstruction and formation of identities. The round image revolves, the perspective is distorted through the fish-eye lens, but we can clearly pick out two intertwined bodies. Perhaps a viewer brings their phone closer to their face to see better. The image continues to revolve, the positions of the people change, hands stroke a back, a stomach, a head. The red carpet and red curtain seem to melt together in the movement. Cuddling is an expression of intimacy. It is classified as a less dramatic or profound physical encounter between people, but it satisfies strong emotional and physical needs for closeness. This is what Hardcore Cuddling draws on. It negotiates the (temporary) dichotomy between hard sex and soft tenderness.

Vika Kirchenbauer

The Island of perpetual tickling (2018)
Video installation, 35′ 38”

Vika Kirchenbauer is a German artist, music producer, and writer. She lives in Berlin. In her work, she engages with Édouard Glissant’s idea of the right to opacity, the structures of post-Fordist employment relations, and the relationship between performer and viewer. The plastic sheets and straps are reminiscent of sex parties, but the blue tones recall the large soft gym class mats of the past. A “tickle” can be something enticing, tempting or forbidden. Suspenseful situations or films tickle our nerves. Tickling as a sadomasochistic practice, as a loving and playful gesture from parents or partner, or as the cruel torture of older siblings or classmates. Play and violence, laughter and pain, the penetration of the private sphere. A mouth that laughs or grimaces, laughter as a sensual reaction or panic reflex, loud shrieking. Laughing until we cry, a questionable pleasure. Tickling is ambivalent.

Tejal Shah

Lucid Dreaming V (2013)
Prints and reproductions, collage, digital print on archival paper

Tejal Shah is a multimedia artist. In her videos, photographs, installations, and drawings, she focuses on the reciprocal relationships between consciousness, ecology, gender and science. She lives and works in New Delhi. A backdrop of apartment blocks, hundreds of square windows. Below, the blue sky, trees, open landscape, rhizomatic roots, knots, and branches. Two figures, with a large, phallic white horn strapped to their heads, seem to swim into the image. These hybrid figures originated in Shah’s 2012 video installation Between the Waves. Here, futuristic, anarchistic, spiritual, scientific, organic, inorganic, utopian, and dystopian elements come together. Everything is bound together by the many roots at the bottom of the image. No entities, instead only the interplay and interrelation of many agents and effects – “making kin” in Donna Haraway’s sense. Is this what postmodern forms of intimacy could look like?

Irma Joanne

Flesh, Rotterdam (2018)
Plaster body project, Rotterdam (2018)
Souled in Stardust, Rotterdam (2017)
Digital prints

For her performances and sculptures, the Dutch artist Irma Joanne wraps her own body or handmade dummies in various plastics or plaster. Flesh swaddled with red foil. Human expressions and extremities become apparent. The body is fragmented, associations with gruesome femicides and slaughterhouses arise. Joanne plays with concealing the form of the body and body parts and then allows them to burst forth; with the body as a sphere of familiarity and intimacy, and with the varied materiality of plastic, foil, fabric, plaster, and skin. Psychology uses the term depersonalisation when people feel alienated from themselves, lose awareness of their own personality, suddenly experience their body or body parts as different or external, or have the feeling of standing outside themselves. Joanne picks up these ideas and fluctuates between the intimacy of one’s own body and alienating effects.

Donna Huanca

CASITA QUINCUNX (2020)
Mixed media, oil and acrylic on textile, lead, plastic, synthetic hair, thread, faux leather, metal on steel frame with aluminum fastenings
Courtesy the artist and PERES PROJECTS, Culver City

Donna Huanca is a multidisciplinary Bolivian-American artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her work includes sculptures, performances, and videos. She focuses intensively on clothing, which she understands as a representation of the human body. An interplay between foil, plastic, and clothing. Different materialities: transparent and opaque, light and heavy, robust and fragile. Huanca plays with opposites. Many of the materials she uses serve to envelop – to protect from outside influences or view. Clothes envelop bodies. These coverings can protect privacy, but they can also be misinterpreted as an invitation to disregard the privacy of others through unwanted physical contact, intrusive stares, questions and comments – and so, in turn, uncover societal problems.

Florian Hetz

Alex, Berlin (2019)
Jo, Berlin (2019)
Giclée prints

Untitled (2016-2019)
Digital photographs

Few fine-art photographers succeed at developing their own unmistakable signature as much as Florian Hetz has. He lives and works in Berlin. Many of his contemporaries document their surroundings in the style of Butt Magazine or Wolfgang Tillman – casual, hairy young men at parties or at home in bed. Hetz, on the other hand, casts an almost clinical eye at male bodies, which are at times so white they appear transparent: an aesthetic intensification of the contrast with Black bodies. The classic poses he utilises are reminiscent of the works of Robert Mapplethorpe from the 1980s – well-composed views of the male body, the alignment of which is repeated in objects that also appear in the image. However, Hetz’ photographs also often contain “interference”: bodily fluids, hair, or scars disrupt the perfect play of forms. And thus intimacy comes into play: the ideal Instagram motif reveals a confusing aspect or a rupture, thus resisting the fleeting, consuming gaze. Although the images initially seem inviolable, they in fact document that the human body is vulnerable and suffers.

Kerstin Drechsel

Untitled, from the series if you close the door (2010)
Oil and pencil on nettle

In her paintings, Kerstin Drechsel addresses intimacy between women who love women, the boundaries of beauty concepts, order and disorder, and the interface between the private and the public. She lives and works in Berlin. There is a sexist cliché that women are constantly in pursuit of love and binding relationships. Lesbian women in particular are seen as “serial monogamists”, even in queer circles. Although anonymous public sex is associated with gay men, including in theoretical work on it, it also has a long history among lesbian women. A dark, dim, sparse establishment which is determined by sexual functionality. As a semi-public place, the darkroom holds potential for intimate and erotic encounters, bodily gratification and closeness, but also fear and loneliness. When people meet in the darkroom, a particular form of communality emerges, a communality without clear social structures – at least for the duration of the encounter.^[6]

Sholem Krishtalka

Midnight Chemistry (2017)
Les Resposants (2017)
Gouache on paper

Spyros Rennt

Menergy (red light), Berlin (2018)
Touched (an abundance of limbs), Berlin (2020)
Pigment prints

Rafael Medina

The end of a love affair #1, #2, #3 – Monday, 03 Feb 2020 – 07 am, Berlin (2020)
Go Bang!, Berlin (2020)
Analogue 35 mm, digital prints on cotton paper

Rafael Medina is a Brazilian photographer who lives in Berlin and documents its nightlife. His works show LGBTQI+ people and focus on sexuality and body positivity. The red light is reflected on the rain-soaked ground. There is nobody to be seen in this place, where masses of sweating bodies usually move to the music, skin to skin. The great love affair of the party CockTail D’Amore, which started in 2009 at the club Griessmühle, is over. It fell victim to investors and gentrification. Roland Barthes writes that the erotic photograph is a disrupted, rough pornographic image. He holds that pornography is homogenous, uniform, and simply exhibits genitals, while eroticism conceals, delays, or distracts.^[8] The Risograph printing process used for Go Bang! produces just this effect. Dirt and graffiti on the tiles of the public toilet, the three men transform the space into a new kind of public convenience. Sex, desire, and intimacy are traditionally relegated to the private sphere, but notably, gay sex happens in public places, so long as you know where, as Medina does.

Victor Luque

Whole, Ferropolis, near Gräfenhainichen (2019)
Photographic print on aluminium Dibond

Victor Luque is one of the photographers who documents Berlin’s queer club scene with his unique eye for the camera. The Spanish artist attempts to capture moods in his photographs, create open-ended narratives, and raise questions. Luque’s photograph of Whole festival inspires thoughts of queer utopias. The Cuban-American queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who worked intensively on utopias, understands queerness as performative, because it is not only a state of being, but also an activity in the direction of the future. This activity can take the form, for example, of protests, performances or parties, which, as it were, “make future in the present”.^[9] The WHOLE United Queer Festival is a queer electronic music and performance festival. It is staged by a cooperation between Berliners and international underground collectives such as Pornceptual and New World Dysorder. Dancing and partying was, and is, a political part of queer history. Amidst the hustle and clamour of the festival, Luque captures still, intimate moments at the Gremminer See. Queer utopia?

George Le Nonce

The Oracle (2020)
Instapoems (2020)
Audio poems

George Le Nonce is a Greek poet, who lives and works in Athens. He has published three poetry books in Greek. His poetry makes use of different textual genres, including short stories, conventional poems, theatrical pieces, and essays, to explore issues like the construction of desire, the terrors of intimacy, and the decay of the body. George is currently working on an English version of his latest, unpublished work, Oracle. Oracle is a collection of fifty short prose pieces and fifty poems based on the work of fifty female poets. Fragile faces, fluid identities and indeterminate voices define the territory of the Oracle. His other unpublished work, Serpent, is a study of sexual desire consisting of 24 poems, 24 999-word quasi-pornographic narratives and 24 short essays. The works presented here, in the poet’s own voice, are selected from the Oracle and from Instapoems, a series of short, imagist poems written in English.

George Le Nonce, The Oracle

places

No one was there but he had the strange sensation that the room itself was staring at him, as at a man who was taking advantage of another’s innocence.
Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair

cannot recall when each of the scenes unfolded don’t believe it’s old age though i
never could recall not even the year after something had happened i could always
remember details of the place insignificant details mostly i could remember the
words we spoke i still can it’s not just about the proximity why do i why did i
i mean what’s the point apart from the obvious the wish to relive the need to relieve
the current pain the paper relief of something lived in a moment unlivable i
know we will always be there we will always be i didn’t always there was a time
when i was unsure cannot recall when that time was

café hafa broken chairs we sat on them regardless you stared at the infinity
before us i stared into your eyes (the sentimentality of it all notwithstanding) you
said this is indeed the end of the world i said but of course they called it the
interzone after all that evening we were chased by a herd of young boys you said
this is like suddenly last summer but without the brutal finality hence without the
imposed madness ingrained madness only cancerous madness from within

amnésie bar on the island you always called it the island it is an island i suppose
even though it’s only a two minute walk from the mainland that dog margot that
always sat on your lap she was ancient but loved the hustle and bustle the
bartender they called the rat the three kisses he gave each of us each time the
perennial smile on your face at least i assumed it would be perennial the walk
back to the hotel across the bridge then the room that tiny room so tiny it
should have been a single a single room a cell

porta bar three stools a microscopic table and isabel pantoja’s music and to think
that wasn’t even in spain neither of us can speak spanish the night the barman
died the french woman’s face turned white i’m going to tell you she said because
you’ve known him for so many years he’s not coming to the island tomorrow as
planned and then there was no more pantoja appropriate though she would have
been the french woman played loud music hordes of tourists danced in oblivion
but they would have danced anyway we had to go this was the very first horror
we shared

that hotel in budapest in buda i believe but i could never tell which was which so
intertwined I believe it reminded us of us our room was named after a minor
german actor with a grand name maximilian i think it was grand indeed life is
a cabaret you said no matter if maximilian was helmut griem’s character or
michael york’s that is if he was the seducer or the innocent i could never recall
names anyway or traits couldn’t trace the agency of seduction we just looked
out the window and smiled by then my face reflected yours i was beginning to
get it this was forever the danube was dark day and night no difference

café bizarre bizarre indeed i think the proprietor’s name was antonio can’t be
sure though it’s been so many decades he smiled and said he was a freak and loved
it and the funny thing is that he was we loved him too we loved him all night as
a matter of fact in the back of the bar after the doors had closed the dutch bartender
watching like a hawk smoking joint after joint and i still can’t believe how young
we were how innocent how pure those public penetrations behind closed doors the
third person didn’t mean a thing the voyeur neither so inexorably pure were we

the kitchen in your friends’ place in that village packed with guests they had to put

us up in the kitchen and a tiny little kitchen it was we would go to the beach for
privacy or hide behind trees in the village square premeditated affections on a
daily basis we said we were going for a walk but everybody knew what this was all
about privacy means hiding from those that know you strangers do not count
you can do anything before strangers and we did we were so young after all
oblivion is despite everything a young lovers’ thing

places i recall mostly details of places words the proximity of the flesh the
proximity indeed the flesh indeed there is no such thing as the soul but the flesh
is the flesh is still there

George Le Nonce, Instapoems

among the ruins

i trusted you implicitly, he said,
that’s why i followed you

i trusted you too, i said,
that’s why i sort of led the way

we were both complicit in this crime
both so naively complacent

apparition

nobody saw him
noboby heard him

yet that sudden warmth in me
was unmistakable

the flood of tears I hadn’t shed
was unmistakable

oh yes he was there
of course he was there

imperceptible to the rest of the living
as lovers are

est-ce que vous pourriez supporter la vie que vous avez?

whether it’s the fingers or the palm of the hand
that first get that tingling feeling
i don’t know

but the sense that you hold his life in your hand
as you grab him
is as unmistakable as the impending
biological proof of the pudding

holiday

let’s go to the same place again
there’s comfort in familiar destinations

surprises are a risk
they can be pleasant or unpleasant

remember those sinister looks we got
at that place we’d never visited

all the unfamiliar streets and sights
all the decisions that had to be made

never again

there’s no time for that
no time for the unlived life

Susanna Paasonen

Infrastructures of Intimacy and the Deplatforming of Sex

Lecture in cooperation with
ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry &
Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL)
Welcome speach by Peter Rehberg
Discussion with Georg Dickmann, Ben Miller
11.02.2021

Tim Dean

How to have Intimacy in an Epidemic

Lecture in cooperation with
ICI Berlin – Institute for Cultural Inquiry &
Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL)
Discussion with Ben Nicholas, Peter Rehberg
26.04.2021

Jean-Luc Nancy

Touche-touche