EXHIBITION 2004

CITIZEN QUEER
from 2004-05-01 to 2004-06-06

Opening: 2004-04-30

CITIZEN QUEER is an interdisciplinary exhibition project discussing trends, joys and dilemmas in contemporary queer practices

Associated Event
Our People Meet Our People

CITIZEN QUEER is an interdisciplinary exhibition project discussing trends, joys and dilemmas in contemporary queer practices.

Rather than showing 'classical' products of LGBTQ art like Catherine Opie's photographic portraits of queer people or Tom of Finland's overtly gay drawings the project aims at visualizing and above all initiating relations and processes between people that might be designated as queer.

Thus pivoting around the relational and dynamic CITIZEN QUEER focuses on time-based artistic formats, like film, video, performance, workshops and informal talks.

Instead of narrowing in on different fixed sexual identities, CITIZEN QUEER seeks to complicate dialectic relations inherent in much gender and gay-lesbian studies as well as in mainstream gay-lesbian culture. Thus, the ultimate success for CITIZEN QUEER will be to begin conceptualizing how to truly substitute a queer quagmire for neat (i.e. binary) categories of sex and sexuality.

Shedhalle has invited a select number of queer art activists to co-curate the show: Sabina Baumann, Zurich; CHEAP Klub, Berlin; Emma Heddich, London; Sands Murray-Wassink, Amsterdam; Maura Reilly, New York

The show will consist of extensive video programming, think tanks, performances, films, panel discussions and parties. Marc Siegel, Emma Hedditch and Maura Reilly (in cooperation with Shedhalle Curator Frederikke Hansen) will curate continuous video programs for the exhibition part of the project. During the course of the exhibition the audience will have the opportunity to meet the curators and discuss their programs, as well as more general queer topics with them.

Sabina Baumann will invite a filmmaker, a theorist, an author, a curator, a chairwoman and a bunch of pubescent youth for a think-tank in order to discuss how to make an educational film on queer identity de/construction. This will be followed up by a workshop conducted by museum educator Christa Suter-Paffrath who invites teachers of the Canton Zurich to re-evaluate the current policies on and the material available for sexual education within the framework of the exhibition.

CHEAP Klub (Marc Siegel, Susanne Sachsse, Daniel Hendrickson, Dragan Asler, Timothy Blue, Angelika Sautter and Nina Thorwart) will arrive from Berlin loaded with costumes, performance props and films. They will stage a Gesamtkunstwerk - a mixed media, mixed identity, mixed everything (except blessings) LIVE act turning theory into practice and turning Shedhalle into a real CHEAP club.

Marc Siegel's program 'Decorating Power: The Politics of Queer Cinema' will document some of the most important political and aesthetical goals of queer cinema since the late 1980s. Film/Videomakers include: Sadie Benning, Vaginal Davis, Cheryl Dunye, John Greyson, Barbara Hammer, and Nguyen Tan Hoang. The weekly screening of a historically significant feature-length queer film, such as Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963) and Dandy Dust (Hans Schierl, 1998) will complement this overview of queer cinema.

Emma Hedditch calls her project for the Shedhalle 'Our People Meet Our People'. She will invite different groups and individuals in and around Zurich to do a film on queer politics together with her. She will write the script and a list of shots for the local people to make individually. They will all meet at the Shedhalle and in the course of five days will produce a film together. And then there will be a launch party.

Emma Hedditch will also curate a video program for the exhibition. A monitor attached to three vhs video players via a channel selector with a dial switch: Proxivion. The switch is dialectical, it searches for oppositions that are proposed by all participants, to the question of identification and solidarity, through practice, theory and capacity, and the refusal of membership.

Sands Murray-Wassink is working on a new performance for the Shedhalle. It will include tongues, open cylinders, atoms, smells. Insertions. Anger, helium balloons, light and darkness, projection, transformation, music, ritual. There will be queer visual culture involved, invoking Herstories, according to his research (theory/practice), especially via feminisms and feminist art forms (gay, lesbian, transgender), lived experience and what has absorbed. The artist will do as much naked as possible. Breath will propel him and embody him and momentary self awareness will determine the directions the work takes. Aesthetics will be heavily involved.

Maura Reilly will co-curate, with Shedhalle Curator Frederikke Hansen, a video program titled 'Queeries,' which will include a series of international videos by Karin Michalski, Terre Thaemlitz, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Ela Troyano, Glen Fogel, Ann P. Meredith, Clark Nikolai and others.

She will also participate in an informal panel about queer visual culture in which she will discuss her various related independent curatorial and activist projects.

concept: Frederikke Hansen

organisation: Shedhalle-Team

artists: Emma Hedditch, Sabina Baumann, Maura Reilly, Sands Murray-Wassink, Marc Siegel, Karin Michalski