PHILIPP GUFLER
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.
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.
06.12.2024, 9 p.m.
Artist talk by: Sam Steverlynck
Reserve your tickets here
The German artist Philipp Gufler (1989), who lives in Amsterdam, expresses himself using a wide range of media: from films to installations, objects, performances, publications and textile works. What connects this multiplicity of media – that are often mutually interrelated – is years of research into queer portrayals based on archival documents including legislation, police reports, newspapers or queer theory as well as oral histories, personal documents and footage from popular culture. For over a decade now, Gufler has been a member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München, an archive and study centre for the LGBTIQ+ community in Munich that also pays attention to personal or forgotten stories. Gufler himself highlights various events, places, periods and people who played a role in the micro and macro history of the queer movement: from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825 - 1895), the legal expert who was a proponent of gay rights and is known as the first man to ever come out, to underground, 1980’s performance artist Rabe perplexum or the non-binary star of reality TV in the 2000s, Lana Kaiser who elicited a multitude of opinions. Elements from these films such as wardrobe items or props, not only occur in the former, but also in his installations or other spatial works. For the filmed performance Cockatoo Archive (2022) he worked with Johanna Gonschorek; both wear robes that incorporate archival items referring to, among others, the people they discuss. Bringing an archive to life as well as reflecting on the former using a variety of visual strategies including collage or superposition, are recurring elements in Gufler’s practice.
Program
Cockatoo Archive, 2022, 29 min.
Becoming-Rabe, 2016, 7 min.
Lana Kaiser, 2020, 13 min.
Conversation with Albert Knoll, 2023, 25 min.
Filmtheater De Uitkijk
Prinsengracht 452
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2023, 25 min.
Camera: Leo van Kann
Production: Forum Queeres Archiv München e.V.
Edit: Philipp Gufler
Translation: Nicholas Maniu
For some time now I wanted to shoot a short film about Albert Knoll's tireless self-organized historical work and ask him why he has dedicated a large part of his life to commemorating the crimes against humanity committed during the Nazi dictatorship and what this archival work has done to him. A special focus is on oral history, as I am interested in how, as a conversational partner, one preserves their knowledge and experiences in a certain way after the death of the contemporary witnesses. After Albert Knoll has done so many contemporary witness interviews the last thirty years and was the one who asked the questions, I reversed the situation in the short film and interviewed him.
OMOVIES
Napoli, Italy
11. – 16.12.2023
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