The exhibition "Odarodle - Sittengeschichte eines Naturmysteriums, 1535-2017" took place from July 21st to October 16th, 2017 at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. As an artistic research exhibition, the project took the Schwules Museum - its history, its collection, and its display practices - as a medium to work with, question, and re-present. A year-long process of collaboration and conversation with a group of around 16 artists invited to participate in the show opened up avenues for thinking about the relevance, impact, and potential of "displaying (homo)sexuality" within contemporary cultural practice. Historically, LGBTIQ* movements have concerned themselves with generating political visibility. What have some of these strategies been? In the case the Schwules Museum , the institution was founded to "show" the particular manners, mores, and ways of a certain special kind of "peoples," in order to represent who "we/they” are and what "we/they” do. How does such an approach rely on established ethnographic methods? And how do these intersect with historical categories of knowledge, such as the "Sittengeschichte”, which sought to visualize and categorize taboo, controversial, or alien phenomena for bourgeois consumption? What happens if one posits the Schwules Museum as an ethnological museum? How does a critical apprehension of vision itself - in its sensual construction over the course of perspectival Modernity - complicate the "politics of visibility" as well as the relationship between images and the imagination? Finally, how do such questions help artists and researchers work through, perform, and present "decolonizing" positions? Ashkan Sepahvand, artist, writer, and curator of the "Odarodle" exhibition, will present some of the ideas behind the project, while addressing these more specific concerns in his lecture. A writing workshop will be offered the next day, in which participants will have a chance to explore more closely some possible strategies for "performing discourse". The lecture and workshop will be held in English.

Workshop:
02.11.2017, 10 - 16.30 Uhr
Raum 2.14.020, Speicher XI, Bremen