Close[t] Demonstrations
an exhibition on the multitudes of queer in_visibility
Semmelweisklinik: Centre for Arts and Culture, Hockegasse 37/4 1180 Vienna
3 - 24 November 2023
An interdisciplinary exhibition presenting artists who imagine a new visual politics of queer representation and explore the connection between desires, ways of living and societal change in visible and/or invisible ways.
The organizers of Close[t] Demonstrations chose a title that playfully introduces and signals elements of transparency, publicness, opacity, invisibility and visibility and their liminalities. Closets and the communities they hold are featured ‘closely’; What it means to be public and to demonstrate for equality becomes reflected; And even monsters are ‘(de)monstrated’ and contained by the title.
The exhibition comprises the work of artists from around the world showcasing work that addresses the relationship between the political and the visual, and explores visual aspects of today’s queer lives, struggles and imaginations. The artworks attempt to unearth the power dynamics, pleasures, and desires involved in queer in_visibilty, and the diverse ways queer in_visibilities manifest within (post)colonial, authoritarian, neoliberal, capitalist regimes.
Close[t] Demonstrations includes zines, videos, installations, films, drawings, embroidery, sculptures, ceramics and illustrations, all of which will be in conversation with each other addressing the topic through different techniques and methodologies. The artworks presented are by invited artists as well as artists selected through an open call.
The exhibition showcases 18 artworks by artists from Kyiv, Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg, Helsinki, Athens, Erzurum, Dhaka, Dnipro, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Oaxaca, Almaty and London. The Close[t] Demonstrations exhibition space and catalogue are in some combination of Arabic, Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS), Bangla, Bashkir, Belarusian, Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Cypriot Turkish, East Frisian, English, Fante, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, IsiXhosa, Kurdish, Nahuatl, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tatar, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
Guided tours, lectures, workshops, discussions
The exhibition program includes guided tours in German with interpreting into Austrian sign language, as well as guided tours in English, Ukrainian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Montenegrin, Turkish and Russian. Moreover, the visitors can participate in performances by Pêdra Costa, a workshop on creative writing through multiple discriminations with Masha Beketova and Syrine Boukadida, a lecture on the relationship between visual and political representation by Elahe Haschemi Yekani and discussions on the conditions of (im)possibility for art creation with Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk and on the optics of queer migration with Tegiye Birey, Ewa Maczynska and Henri Dennis.
opening hours and full exhibition programme
Team
This exhibition is a collaboration between the research platform "GAIN - Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities" and the FWF project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance” at the University of Vienna, the Academy of Fine arts Vienna.
The exhibition is curated by Mag. Dr. Anna T., an artist, educator, and curator based in Vienna. Her artistic, curatorial, and scholarly work draw from poststructuralism, queer theory, decoloniality, peripheral knowledge, aesthetics, and affect.
Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Katharina Wiedlack is project leader of the exhibition and the art research project "Magic Closet and the Dream Machine" on the representation of queer life in/from the post-Soviet space. She is Assistant Professor for Anglophone Cultural Studies at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna.
Artists, speakers, and workshop leaders
The list of our contributors includes, but is not limited to:
Naomi Rincón Gallardo (Mexico) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist whose work addresses the creation of counter-worlds in neo-colonial settings. Her critical-mythical worldmakings integrate her interests in Mesoamerican cosmologies, music videos, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of color critique.
Pêdra Costa (Brazil/Germany) is a ground breaking, formative Brazilian, visual and urban anthropologist, tarot reader and performer based in Berlin that utilizes intimacy to connect with collectivity. Their work aims to decode violence and transform failure whilst tapping into the powers of resilient knowledge from a plethora of subversive ancestralities that have been integral anti-colonial and necropolitical survival.
Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Germany) is Professor of English and American Literature and Culture with a focus on Postcolonial Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. A cultural and literary studies scholar, she has worked on topics like the Anglophone novel, Black Atlantic and Diasporic Writing, Gender/Masculinity Studies and Queer Theory, and Popular and Visual Culture. She is the author of Familial Feeling and The Privilege of Crisis. Her latest book Revisualising Intersectionality, written with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne, has just been published open access with Palgrave Macmillan.
