art & culture


Why think about art and (audio-)visual culture from a queer perspective? In order to criticize dominant symbolic orders, as well as to develop queer cultural politics? If representation does not simply depict or imitate something absent, but functions as production of meaning and social reality, it has a political dimension. Yet, why would one call certain aesthetic strategies or cultural politics queer? Is there something like queer art? What does is mean to queer dominant symbolic orders? What does it mean to exert sociopolitical struggles through aesthetic means?

According to theories of hegemony, late modern governance operates less through repression and more through gaining consent for social inequalities and capitalist socioeconomic orders. Such processes of consensus production depend on cultural products and practices, like movies, literature, news, documentaries, photography, music, and visual art, that influence what is called common sense. Yet, under which conditions do cultural practices reproduce and stabilize normative power constellations, and when do they have resistant or subversive effects? Is there a difference between everyday and artistic, between social or cultural practices? How do they differ or intertwine? What does it mean to break compliance via cultural means, in a fictional space or a utopian time?

RECENT EVENTS
for a full overview of events, please research the chronological archive

Poetic Transitions

Workshop 4 of the series Queere Multilingualities and Embodied Speech, June 29, 2023, 5-8 pm, Vienna. With Chaka Collective (Claudia Frikh-Khar, Nina Höchtl, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt), performance artist Pêdra Costa and author and scholar Daniela Rodríguez.

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The membra(I)ne as a Translation Device

workshop during the conference membra(I)nes, Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle & Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, June 15-17, 2023
The artist Ančan Daučíková will be present with their video Talking to You, 2021. With reference to this as well as two other, text-based materials we will explore in the workshop how the figure of the membrane contributes to understanding translation processes. What does this mean for the concrete challenges of translating queer_ness, or for handling norms? Is it of interest that membra(I)nes refer simultaneously to g´human and machinic translation as well as a cyborgian version of both?

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membra(I)nes

Conference, June 15-17, 2023 Can the concept of the membrane therefore help us overcome anthropocentric thinking? And if so, how does it allow to address hierarchies and power imbalances among humans? Can it mobilize decolonial critiques of a posthumanist discourse as a model to thinking in gender studies and feminist science and technology studies? Will a queer understanding of desire or a Black feminist understanding of eroticism help us to draw new, unexpected connections between these relationships and environments?

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Multilingually queer

Workshop Monday May 8, 2023, 1-3 pm (CET), part of the series queere multilingualität and embodied speech with Mariana Aboim, Rubia Salgado as well as Martin*a Vahamäe-Zierold and Maria Kopf. Hybrid event in DGS (German Sign language), English, German, and Portugues.

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The Multilingual Issue

Concept and work program of an issue of InterAlia. Journal of Queer Studies, edited by Anna T. and Antke A. Engel. Some of the questions asked are: Which languages, dialects, registers, or codes do you use to communicate issues related to pleasures, desires, and communities? What does it mean when one’s first language is shadowed by another acquired later on? What is the impact on the person and their communities? How does language affect your sense of identity and belonging and what is the role of visibilities and opacities in that?

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Queer Theory Videos

Bodies, Figurations, Worlds. Three Video Introductions to Queer Theory by Antke. A. Engel and Filmfetch (Tali Tiller und Magda Wystub). On Friday March 12, 4:30-6:30 pm the videos will be presented online as part of FernUni Hagen’s Gender Days.
In an artistic and experimental academic form these videos invite a wide public to encounter queer theory as a critique of structures of domination. Thinking difference through dynamics of power and desire they reflect on sex_gender and sexuality, the power of language, and modes of resistance to planetary inequalities and histories of violence.

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