Paul's House at Konteksty Festival of Ephemeral Art in Sokołowsko

 

Paul's House

at Konteksty Festival of Ephemeral Art in Sokołowsko, Poland

Friday, 8. July, 18:30 – 19:30

The performance Paul's House by Philipp Gufler explores who owns the memory and history of artist Paul Hoecker (1856–1910). After having been almost entirely forgotten for over a century, the performance stresses the urgency to celebrate his work and legacy in Poland and Germany. 

Paul Hoecker was an influential, long overlooked figure in the Munich art scene around 1900. As a painter, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and co-founder of the Munich Secession, he was active in a phase of fundamental upheaval at the interface of tradition and modernism. After international success through his participation in the first three Venice Biennales and the World's Fair in Chicago, a scandal forced him to resign from his professorship in 1897 - caused by homophobic rumours about a painting of the Virgin Mary for which a male sex worker was the model. In the following years, he lived in self-imposed exile in Italy, on Capri and in Rome, before returning to his birthplace of Oberlangenau (now Długopole Górne) in Silesia in 1901.

Together with Stefan Gruhne, Nicholas Maniu and Christina Spachtholz, Philipp Gufler is part of the Paul Hoecker Research Group at the self-organized Forum Queeres Archiv München since 2019. One aim of the research group is to draw attention to Paul Hoecker's work and life outside Germany, particularly in his birthplace, today's Poland. Paul Hoecker immortalised his birthplace in several paintings. In April 2025, Philipp Gufler visited the Hoecker-House. 

Paul's House describes the life and work of Paul Hoecker as a shared German-Polish queer history. At the Konteksty Festival in Sokolowsko near Długopole Górne, Philipp Gufler will be showing a performance about his artistic exploration of Paul Hoecker's birthplace.

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

----

Divine Queer Film Festival

Turin, Italy

23. – 25.4.2025

Further Information

----

Queering the Belvedere

Blickle Kino im Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria

12. 6.2025, 18:30

Further Information

---

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.

Photos: Jannis Uffrecht 

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

© Videonale | photo: David Ertl

 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)