Urning & Urningin. Language and Desire since 1864

 

URNING AND URNINGIN 

Language and Desire since 1864

9 January – 12 April 2026

Opening: Friday, January 9, 8 - 11 p.m. 

Curated by Philipp Gufler

Artists: Sharan Bala, CAConrad, Philipp Gufler, Eli Hill, KRIWET, Cosy Pièro, Rory Pilgrim, Sophie Serber, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Louwrien Wijers

Note: this exhibition takes place in our renewed location at De Constant Rebecqueplein in The Hague.

Love and desire between people of the same sex have existed throughout history. For centuries, there was no language to name these desires–except in medical and legal terms that defined them as illness or crime. This began to change thanks to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), a German lawyer who was the first to describe same-sex desire as an identity category. Ulrichs conducted extensive research into what he called ‘uranism’, built a network of scholars around it, and argued that queer desire should be recognised as something innate rather than criminal. With his own vocabulary he articulated queer identity long before words such as homosexual, gay, or queer existed.

Ulrichs’ legacy forms the starting point for the exhibition Urning and Urningin. Language and Desire since 1864. The title refers to Ulrichs’ positive description for himself and others with queer desire: Urning and Urningin. He used these words publicly for the first time in his series of pamphlets Riddle of Male-Male Love, published between 1864 and 1880. Before that, queer desires were left unnamed and treated as equivalent to forbidden sodomy in Western society at the time. Ulrichs’ new words were widely used in German at the end of the 19th century and were also adopted in the Netherlands and beyond. Although his terminology did not stick in the current times, Ulrichs’ ideas laid the groundwork for modern queer theory.

In this exhibition, guest curator Philipp Gufler explores the limitations of language–then and now–in expressing desire, and calls for intersectional solidarity. Alongside original documents and letters by Ulrichs, which offer a glimpse into his era and the influence of his thinking, nine contemporary artists have been invited. Through their work, they reflect on themes of (gender)identity, language, and queer desire. Marking the 200th anniversary of Ulrichs’ birth, this exhibition connects past and present, showing how exchange across generations can be both hopeful and transformative.

A publication will be released alongside the exhibition, featuring a pamphlet by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, visual material by the artists, and newly commissioned texts by Gürsoy Doğtaş, Hendrik Folkerts and Simon(e) van Saarloos. 

Nest
De Constant Rebecqueplein 20-B
2518 RA Den Haag
The Netherlands

Photos: Kyle Tryhorn

Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Techniques of Becoming

October 16, 2021 – January 23, 2022

Artists
Daniel G. Andújar, Banu Cennetoglu, Kate Crawford / Vladan Joler, Thirza Cuthand, Anna Dasovic, Laressa Dickey, Eva Egermann, Magdalena Freudenschuss, Robert Gabris, Ali Gharavi, Niklas Goldbach, Philipp Gufler, Jan Peter Hammer, Minna Henriksson, Che-Yu Hsu, Nina Støttrup Larsen, Yunyop Lee, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Suntag Noh, Jo Spence, P. Staff, peter steudtner, Sunaura Taylor, Romily Alice Walden, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Workers' Families Seeking Justice (WFSJ) and its Support Group

Curators
Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Viktor Neumann

Techniques of Becoming is the third and last part of the exhibition series Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, which was conceived in turn as a continuation of the Bergen Assembly 2019, a triennial for contemporary art in Norway.

Following the revolt of the bodies and the political dimensions of the festival, the third part revolves on the effects and dynamics of infrastructures. The exhibition explores the institutions, networks, architectures, and logistics both of materialized and immaterial nature, with regard to their entangled relations with the prevailing neoliberal and neocolonial power structures.

In addition to the museum, the school, the clinic, or the prison— those classical institutions of biopower that philosopher Michel Foucault investigated extensively and consequently has influenced generations if thinkers and artists—the exhibition focuses on infrastructures that enable the global circulation and administration of commodities, currencies, affects, and discourses: social media, computer games, and other systems of so-called smart technologies. It probes how these institutions and systems are entangled with structural forms of sexism, racism, pathologization, violence against non-normative and more-than-human bodies, and capitalist extractivsm of recources and living beings.

The show further reflects on the historical contexts of classifying, normalizing, and excluding forms of governing, looking into their histories from the emergence of modern nation-states to the establishment of globally and digitally active economies. The invited artists counter these structures and their mechanisms of exclusion, pathologization, and oppression with aesthetic and activist practices of appropriation, empowerment, and transformation. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze described the act of becoming as a polymorphic and constant process of change and of the affirmation of difference. In this sense, the artists negotiate becoming as site of possibilities and as a technique for exercising autonomy over one’s own body, for the development of structures of mutual support and for the formation of counter-publics.

Saturday, October 30, 2021, 6 p.m.

Philipp Gufler, Quilts*

Lecture and film screenings on various queer and other protagonists from Philipp Gufler's Quilt series

Württ. Kunstverein Stuttgart

Schlossplatz 2
D-70173 Stuttgart