What is queer today is not queer tomorrow

14 June–10 August 2014
Opening: 13 June 2014

Exhibition
Event Series

Location(s):
nGbK, Oranienstraße 25

www.heidyngbk.blogspot.de

Artists

Florian Aschka, Stephanie Ballantine, Amber Bemak, Eduardo Conceição & Romy Kießling & Michaela Muchina, Black Cracker, Denial Cremer, Morty Diamond, Giegold & Weiß, Emma Haugh, Evan Ifekoya, Ins A Kromminga, Ligia Manuela Lewis, Claudio Manoel, Özgür Erkök Moroder, Marit Östberg, Eshan Rafi, Raju Rage, Tucké Royale & Marianne Dieterle & Karl Phillip Kummer, Aykan Safoğlu, Daniel Santiago, FranzKa Schuster & Jannik Franzen, Michael V Smith, Solange, Juan Soto & Chiara Marañon, Vassiliea Stylianidou, tô aberta!, Rein Vollenga, ZANA

Project group heidy

Derrick Hercules Amanatidis, Anna Bromley, Luce deLire, Kaciano Barbosa Gadelha, Debra Kate, Adriell Kopp, Laura Paetau, Simon Jaikiriuma Paetau, Luc Reboullet, zoya

The exhibition What is Queer Today is Not Queer Tomorrow explores the theme of queer temporality. The project responds to debates within queer milieus (lesbian, gay, trans*, intersex-, etc.) and to the increasing integration of queer ways of life into the political mainstream. The nGbK becomes an explicit venue of experience, confrontation, reflection, lingering, exchange and departure.

What is ‘queer?’ What was perhaps once queer – and what has been omitted from this framework? What could queer be? The exhibition raises questions about community, identity, visibility and sex; it opens up postcolonial perspectives and tales of lesbian-gay-trans*-bi-inter-queer stories, hair, bodies, porn and capitalism. During the eight-week exhibition, artists will intervene in the white cube of the nGbK. Selected works will enter the space over time or be developed in an ongoing process that visitors can accompany.

What is Queer Today is Not Queer Tomorrow has been conceived and organised by the (heidy) collective, an nGbK project group, which consists of persons working with performance, theory video, text and images – some are people of color, some are identified as cis- or trans-, some are gay or lesbian, some are not.

Press commentary

queer.de, 19.06.2014 (Kevin Clarke)
„Obwohl Queer Art und Queer Studies weltweit derzeit voll im Trend liegen, gab’s in Deutschland noch nicht allzu viel PR-trächtige Projekte in diese Richtung, jedenfalls nicht in Mainstream-Museen. […] Jetzt ist die Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (ngbk) in Kreuzberg in die Bresche gesprungen und hat eine Ausstellung eröffnet, die den wunderbaren Titel trägt ‘What is queer today is not queer tomorrow’.“

taz, 20.06.2014 (Enrico Ippolito)
„Das Konzept des Queeren stellt alles in Frage – Heteronormativität, Geschlechterbilder, Gesellschaftstrukturen und eben auch Machtverhältnisse. In diesem Sinne stellen auch die Künstler_innen in der nGbK Fragen. Auch um ‘queere Zeitlichkeit’ soll es gehen: Was war vielleicht mal queer? Was könnte queer sein? […] Queerness ohne Historie – unvorstellbar. Und gesellschaftlich scheinen wir uns in der Wiederholungsschleife zu befinden, wieder in einer Zeit der Zensur. Von daher nimmt das Ausloten zwischen subtilen Codes und expliziter Pornographie auch in der Ausstellung großen Raum ein.“

Tagesspiegel, 23.06.2014 (Anna Pataczek)
“Für die [Ausstellung] hat ein zehnköpfiges Kuratorenteam eine facettenreiche, ausgeruhte Auswahl von Künstlerinnen und Künstlern aus der ganzen Welt getroffen, mit Malerei, Zeichnung, Installation, Video und Performances, die über die ganze Laufzeit verteilt in den Räumen des Kreuzberger Kunstvereins stattfinden werden. Queer bedeutet hier mehr als nur die Beschreibung einer schwul-lesbisch-, trans- und intersexuellen Community, es geht ums Auflösen von Grenzen.”

Events:

Friday, 13 June, 19h
Opening + Party
19h: Opening and Performance with Eshan Rafi
22h: Party with DJ’s Svetlana Pall Mall & FordKelly und VJ Black Cracker

Tuesday, 17 June, 16h
performance by Eshan Rafi
“Touching / Diana” is an ongoing project that considers queer feelings and colonial encounters through embodying, touching and tracing the late Princess Diana.

Thursday, 19 June, 20h
A night of short films
“Off-White Tulips” by Aykan Safoğlu
“Uli&Ralle” by Laura Paetau, mit Alexandra Konknat, Anna Casanova Nicolas
(2012, 8min, akademie der autodidakten, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Germany)
&
Films by Simon Jaikiriuma Paetau (Total screening time 1:40h)

Thursday, 26 June, 20h
“Sensation I”, Concept: Ligia Manuela Lewis, Performer: Martin Hansen
Music: Whitney Houston, “I will always love you” (live performance at Divas Live, 1999)

Friday, Saturday and Sunday (27-29 June), 12-17h
“Companions”, Performance Series at nGbK, by Aykan Safoğlu
Aykan will search for queer forms of solidarity and potential companions in the nGbK archives on two different weekends. These performances will be based on communal experiments to appropriate the artistic heritage of nGbK and to find alternate readings of recent queer his/herstories from Berlin.

Thursday, 3 July, 20h
“Genital Call” Alex Giegold & Tomka Weiß
Performative engagement responding to trans- and interphobic legislation. Genitals will be drawn by courtroom illustrator according to participant’s live self description.

Friday - Sunday, 4-6 July, 12-17h
“Companions”, Performance Series by Aykan Safoglu
Aykan will search for queer forms of solidarity and potential companions in the nGbK archives on two different weekends. These performances will be based on communal experiments to appropriate the artistic heritage of nGbK and to find alternate readings of recent queer his/herstories from Berlin.

Thursday, 10 July, 18h
“Slow dances with strangers/ X ray vision”, performance by Michael V. Smith
In two pieces by Canadian Michael V. Smith, smartphones create an intimate one-on-one performance for audience and performer
20h
“The same old or so they say. Or why I rarely speak so personally”, Black Cracker

Saturday, 12 July, 16h
“Slow dances with strangers/ X ray vision”, performance by Michael V. Smith
In two pieces by Canadian Michael V. Smith, smartphones create an intimate one-on-one performance for audience and performer.

Thursday, 17 July, 20h
Christopher Street Denial Berlin
the fourth CSD for Berlin - and the shortest.
Ego-Show, Boy-Drag-Performance, mini-Parade......

Thursday, 24 July 2014, 20h,
Raju Rage
entrance free

“The Dilemma of the Diaspora to Define”
Examining the tensions and conflicts around cultural identity, diaspora, and queerness. Exploring occupying and performing race, ethnicity and queerness and the way South Asian (queer) bodies have to navigate and negotiate their bodies in a western world where there is often a conflict between tradition, culture, defining ourselves and expressing our (queer) identit/ies and how it is read/misread. Being visible and yet invisible, at the same or different times, and the affect of temporality, time and space, symbolism, stereotypes, ethnic/cultural codes and gazes on the body. Creating culturally coded objects based on those usually used to express cultural identity and exploring how queer bodies embody, transgress and manipulate these objects, using narratives/sculpture/sound/performance to essentially question what is the desire to know and what can we know?

Saturday, 26 July 2014, 11-17h,
Workshop, Emma Haugh
entrance free

Saturday & Sunday (Samstag & Sonntag), 26-27 July, 11h - 15h
READING TROUPE #02 IMAGINATIVE DISSONANCE performing queer futurity
In this two day workshop, the second installment of Emma Haugh’s READING TROUPE, you are invited to engage in ‘the being singular plural of queerness’ via disruptive interventions into excerpts from the text ‘CRUISING UTOPIA The Then and There of Queer Futurity’ by José Esteban Muñoz’.
Within the “reading troupe”, the “readers” are invited to participate in an active embodiment of knowledge dissemination and production (through reflexive documentation strategies). Located between reading group and theatre rehearsal applying techniques by Augusto Boal, this intensive two-day workshop encourages each participant to become a critical agent who performs what might be living within a text.

A publication documenting READING TROUPE #01 PHYSICAL EDUCATION exercises in embodying discourse can be found on the artist’s website http://www.emmahaugh.com/downloads
The text will be made available to participants in advance of the workshop.

Thursday, 31 Juli 2014, 20h,
Evan Ifekoya
entrance free

‘PREFORM Edition’ (There be Dragons here but I carry something of you everywhere I go) by Evan Ifekoya
You are looking so boy/girl or is it Caliban today? Orisha. Any new followers…any new likes… any new requests? Repeat. ‘PREFORM Edition’ explores an autobiography and the lives that have inspired it through Evan’s experience as a queer person of colour. In daily life, occupying a space that is read as neither male nor female, alongside inhabiting a body that is racially marked, Evan is met with hostility. This work aims to reclaim that space, challenging it artistically through provocative yet humorous devised performance. Performance and New media Artist Evan Ifekoya weaves together video, performance and social media interaction into a live event; presenting a black, genderqueer feminist perspective lived today.

Sunday, 03 August 2014, 12.30-17h,
talk & workshop with Evan Ifekoya & Raju Rage
entrance free

(E)merging identity and creative practice
a creative & critical talk & workshop with Evan Ifekoya & Raju Rage
In small groups we will critically discuss and reflect on the nine micro cultures that make up our identity – class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, religion, ability, age and geography. The aim is for each participant to examine each microculture individually and explore how each has contributed to their whole person. From this, we will produce a series of portraits that will be presented to the group at the end of the session, using transparent (OHP) paper, pens, tape, a camera and projector. Through a creative and transformative process, we will perform and actualise future selves that engage with our past.

Thursday, 07 August 2014, 19h,
Shaka McGlotten & Kaciano Gadelha
entrance free

Talks by Shaka McGlotten & Kaciano Gadelha of the heidy collective
Black Data is an academic and curatorial project that brings together black queer studies and aesthetic practices with critical analyses of Big Data, and the state and corporate collusions which seek to capture, predict, and modulate human behavior and expression.
&
Tracking desire. How far is the next guy? Tracking desire is a talk about fragmented bodies, virtual landscapes and architectures of desire among gay men. In what extent has “gay” become just a sign for travelling pleasures translated into digital data? Tracking desire is also about shaping and deforming (Gestaltung ind Entgestaultung) the contours between human and nonhumans.

Thursday, 07 August 2014, 20h,
Performance by Solange, tô aberta!
entrance free

Performance by Solange, tô aberta!
Solange, tô aberta! (Solange, I’m open!) is a project by Pedro Costa in the format of a show, in the style of funk dance (originally from the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro) that blends queer, punk and drag with the sound of Funk Carioca. It uses funk as a tool of political resistance. Distorting its initial form, it promotes a true explosion of cathartic dance and politics. It speaks of those bodies that want openness and space to exist, staging the unclassifiable and questioning sexuality, gender, identity and stereotypes.

Performances will take place at weekly intervals, the documentations of which will also become part of the exhibition space.

More information and updates on the events at: www.heidyngbk.blogspot.de

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