The Beginning of Identification, and its End at Filmfestivals

 

The Beginning of Identification, and its End

by Philipp Gufler, 2024

19 min.
Music: Rory Pilgrim
Camera and color correction: Leo van Kann
Sound: Nathalie Bruys
Speaker: Susanne Sachsse
Contains adaptations of a performance by Ben d’Armagnac at Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1978 and text fragments from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s books Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe, 1864–1880.

The short film by Philipp Gufler initially exhibits a binary situation: light blue and pink, flexibly assigned to two genders historically. This binarity liquefies in a lovely, obscuring initial development, androgynous bodies from various times appear with a text by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a pioneer of the ›third sex‹ theory. In the 19th century, he called for the public visibility of sexual diversity, as an imperative addressed to the »Uranians«: Expose yourselves, carry societal contempt onto the political stage, demonstrate solidarity with other oppressed people! An imperative of identification, a beginning of the history of queer emancipation. The circular form of the planet Uranus, for Ulrichs a utopian place of self-empowerment, is juxtaposed with the rectangular form of a tile trapezium. In it, the nude artist surrenders to a jet of water aimed at his heart. A ›naked body shot‹ that comments on the investigative, fixating gaze of society on the ›actual‹ gender of human beings. Here, Gufler cites a performance of Ben d’Armagnac from 1978, but is, in contrast with him, nude. The heart region symbolically hit by the jet of water becomes the erogenous zone of passivity. The second movement of the work leads to the end of the emancipation narrative. On the right side of the screen appear the right-wing positions of the ‘bad gays’ of our time (Pim Fortuyn, Alice Weidel, a neo-Nazi), in the historical footsteps of Ernst Röhm; self-confident gays and lesbians who have rejected solidarity, aim their toxic water at everything weak and at all sexual intermediaries and work to reconstruct binary conditions that allow for no third sex. The artist leaves the frame. (Jan Künemund for Videonale.20)

Filmfestivals

71. International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen (World Premiere)

German Competition

3.-4.5.2025

Further Information

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DISLOCATIONS—in sight

13.04.2025 – 22.06.2025

Opening: April 12, 2025, 6 – 9 PM

in sight is the first program sequence of DISLOCATIONS. It examines how different spaces condition the (in)visibility of bodies—showing, controlling, and inscribing them into history. Queer, female*, and subcultural perspectives on archives disrupt imposed orders through moments of shift and distortion. The exhibition employs projections to highlight what often remains in the dark: videos by Philipp Gufler and Naomi Rincón Gallardo and a sculpture and video by Constantin Hartenstein appear in the dimly lit exhibition space, displayed alongside slides from galerie weisser elefant. These works contribute to a feminist reinterpretation of archival materials in a display designed by Martha Schwindling. The exhibition is in dialogue with a performance by Lola von der Gracht and Danila Lipatov’s research on queer subcultures in the late GDR.

Curated by Natalie Keppler & Agnieszka Roguski (Artistic Directors Kunst Raum Mitte)

Kunst Raum Mitte
Auguststrasse 21
10117 Berlin

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday – Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm
Admission to all exhibitions and events is free of charge.

VIDEONALE.20 

11.4. – 18.5.2025

Opening: April 10, 7 pm

We are celebrating the 20th edition of Videonale as an eventful festival of encounters with video art and its makers: 26 international historical and contemporary works of video art can be seen in an elaborate exhibition presentation at the Kunstmuseum Bonn and at six exhibition stations in the city of Bonn. 

With works by Mark Bain, Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Viktor Brim, Chto Delat, VALIE EXPORT, Ken Feingold, Beatrice Gibson & Nick Gordon, Gorilla Tapes, Philipp Gufler, Akiko Hada, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ida Kammerloch, Stéphanie Lagarde, Alwin Lay, Lukas Marxt, Angelica Mesiti, Ana María Millán, Marcel Odenbach, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Dani & Sheilah ReStack, Julia Scher, Maryam Tafakory, Ana Torfs, Jan Verbeek, Yan Wai Yin, Anna Zett. 

PROGRAM OPENING DAY 1

Friday, April 11, 2025

ON RESILIENCE
11.30am–1.00pm

Artist talk at Auditorium Kunstmuseum Bonn

Since the emergence of video art in the 1960s, artists have been using the medium of video to confront the oppression of people and their diversity in subversive, resistant and resilient ways. Many works of the VIDEONALE.20 address the social, political and ecological conditions to which human and non-human subjects are involuntarily exposed and how different subjects can withstand those conditions. The medium of video becomes an instrument of exposure, preservation, and world building and thus itself an expression of resilience. In three discussion rounds, VIDEONALE.20 artists will talk about the phenomenon of resilience in their work.

Philipp Gufler / Kat Lawinia Gorska

A jet of water is aimed at the heart region of a naked body that stands firm: In THE BEGINNING OF IDENTIFICATION, AND ITS END, Philipp Gufler uses historical footage and staged moving images to explore the successful emancipation history of gender diversity and the visibility of queer bodies, which he contrasts with contemporary homonationalism and its appropriation of LGBTIQ emancipation demands for the sake of anti-Muslim racism and exclusion.

Kunstmuseum Bonn
Museumsmeile
Helmut-Kohl-Allee 2
53113 Bonn

Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Wednesday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Closed on Monday

 

Gaps, Leaps, Fractures – Queer Temporalities.

28.03.2025 to 19.06.2025

Opening: Thu 27.03.2025, 6 p.m. 

curated by Sylvia Sadzinski

Queer experiences of time deviate from normative and linear rhythms. They are characterized by coming-outs or transitions, have breaks, gaps and leaps. Queer temporalities explore non-linear concepts of time and oppose normative time structures based on reproduction and age appropriateness, among others. The exhibition Gaps, Leaps, Fractures – Queer Temporalities brings together artistic positions that deal with fragmented understandings of time. Using various media, the artists question not only normative concepts of life, but also common notions of productivity and efficiency. The artistic works open up spaces for alternative narratives about queer life and love, explore moments of community and transformation, break with hegemonic historiographies and make voids visible. The past is interwoven with the present and futures are designed beyond chrononormative constraints.

With: Ren Loren Britton, Benjamin Busch, Philipp Gufler, Constantin Hartenstein, Laura Nitsch, Dana Lorenz, Lee Stevens

Queer Museum Vienna
at Otto Wagner Areal, former “Direktion”, Stiege 2, Hochparterre,
Baumgartnerhöhe 1
1140 Wien

Entrance free

Thursday: 14:00-18:00
Friday: 14:00-18:00h
Saturday: 14:00-18:00h
Sunday: 14:00-18:00h

 

QUEER AGAINST OPPRESSION AND FACISM

A benefit t-shirt for the new queer-feminist archive center in Berlin by the FFBIZ, Spinnboden archive and the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Society.

30 Euros + shipping

in light pink and dark-blue in S-XXL!

The first archive centre for lesbian-queer, feminist and sexual history, research, education and culture is moving to Neukölln in Berlin. They need your financial support for this. Three of Berlin's oldest and most important memory centres are setting up a joint archive centre.

What for? Collecting and preserving lesbian, gay, queer and feminist history is becoming increasingly important in times of a renewed shift to the right! The struggles of the past are our mission today - to inform, strengthen and inspire the generations that come after us. The merger as an archive centre means long-term security for the three participating archives: contracts for 99 years with the guarantee of stable rents and more space for the growing collections.

In the t-shirt motive, Philipp Gufler updates a poster of the National Working Group Repression against Gays (NARGS). This group, working supra-regionally from 1977 until 1981, adopted the motif of the Pink Triangle, in memory of the homosexual victims of National Socialism. The Pink Triangle was used to identify prisoners outed as homosexual in the concentration camps. Since then, it has been used as a positive identification and a political symbol by various queer movements, such as ACT UP during the initial period of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s.

Philipp Gufler links this historical sense with current debates on gender-sensitive language and trans-identities together with the threat to democracy through right-wing extremism and populism. Queer  against oppression and facism is an intervention in current cultural debates, focusing on solidary communities instead of identitarian differences.

Order here (in Germany) or via E-mail (international shipping).

On the Necessity for Grasroots Historical Activism

 

PHILIPP GUFLER

On the Necessity for Grasroots Historical Activism

FILE 1, p. 16-32

in: Open Archief - Artistic Reuse of Archives edited by Eline de Graaf, Michael Karabinos, Thijs van Leeuwen, Cees Martens, Marius Schwarz 

Published by International Institute of Social History, Nieuwe Instituut and Sound & Vision.

Read online (PDF)

An Invitation to Indulge, solo exhibition at BWA Warszawa

 

Philipp Gufler

AN INVITATION TO INDULGE

Opening, Friday, November 29 from 5 to 9 p.m. 

On view till January, 25, 2025. 

Philipp Gufler (born in Germany in 1989) delves into the history of Germany, The Netherlands and beyond, using his research to create works composed of pigment-spattered mirrors. Rectangular, triangular, square, these forms are reminiscent of the recognizable modernist shapes in the paintings of Frank Stella. Repetitive, geometric divisions into fields of color emanate a sense of calm and dignity. At times, it’s just color, or rather the material the pigment was drawn from, that is queerying our thought process, twisting the realm of pure abstraction into a narrative inspired by real-life events.

Is it not a carnation, whose pink essence covers the surface of such a mirror, a Wildesque symbol of cruising around the city in search of a partner? Can we talk about the suffering of the LGBTQ+ community without including pink triangles, which were the shapes the Nazis made gay people sew into their clothing at concentration camps during the Third Reich? These motifs set Gufler’s mirrored works into the queer context in a fascinating way, opening doors to the increasingly crowded room marked “Queer Art.” In Poland, it’s a novel moment. In this context, it’s worth mentioning the conceptual project by Karol Radziszewski Invisible (History of Belarussian Queerness) which comprises a series of purposely overexposed images, arranged as black squares on a white background. These images portray events from the lives of gay Belarussians in Communist Minsk. There’s also his “Flag” series, which references the Olympic symbol. Gufler goes one step further, launching a game onto the field of modernist art, whereby the mirror image is a symbol of relativity. This convention has been expertly applied in the past by the likes of Andy Warhol and Michelangelo Pistoletto in the west, and Edward Krasiński in Poland.

Gufler’s mirrored reflections are suffused with pigment, so they no longer depict their subject in a direct way. Instead, the vibrant mix of colors, cut up with slashes of more color, mar their reflections, just like gossip and lies mar the facts of life. The world in these mirrors is radically different from the one we know.

An Invitation to Indulge stands as an appendix of sorts to Gossipmongers (a group show bringing together Philipp Gufler, Karol Radziszewski and Jaanus Samma). A piece of gossip may often be the only bit of information we are afforded about an event, which doesn’t quite fit into the main narrative, primarily because it refers to an excluded group: for instance, women, immigrants, queer people. The archaeology of collective LGBTQ+ memory is based on detailed accounts tucked away in private archives. These documents are often coded, to disguise them from the prying eyes of society, who have the power to ostracize and censure, blurring out everything that is outside of the bounds of the heterosexual norm. And yet, don’t the histories written by heterosexual men through the ages also bend the truth, twist the facts to create a binary, black-and-white image of the world, with no room for shades of gray? Perhaps the queer-infused vision of the world conjured by Philipp Gufler isn’t so unrealistic as some might think. Perhaps a closer look would in fact bring us closer to the truth?

Photo: Julika Rudelius and Bartosz Zalewski

BWA WARSZAWA
ul. Marszałkowska 34/50/666
00-554 Warsaw

Tuesday - Friday
12 - 7 p.m.
Saturday noon - 4 p.m.