A video installation composed of a performance by the artist alongside archival film scenes centered on queer and transgender content. Presented across two projections, the film juxtaposes explicit and everyday expressions of non-normative sexuality: from people dancing freely at a lesbian party to Charlotte Charlaque's reverent smile, and the provocative speeches of far-right homosexual politicians. This collage is underscored by a rich soundtrack featuring recitations from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s seminal 19th-century texts advocating for decriminalizing homosexual love, interwoven with atmospheric and pulsating soundscapes by English artist Rory Pilgrim. These elements immerse viewers in a poetic and political reflection on the histories and expressions of excluded sexualities and genders.
"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." - Gufler
Who was Lana Kaiser? A pop star? A phantom? Born Daniel Küblböck and disappeared under tragic circumstances, Lana Kaiser is the secret favorite star of the German trans scene. A fan discussion about the queer icon.
In 2002, Lana Kaiser became well known in the first season of the German version of the Idol television franchise. She was born in 1985 and went by her birth name Daniel Küblböck. At only 17 years old she polarised the audience with her androgynous appearance and open bisexuality. On September 9th 2018, Lana disappeared from a cruise ship on her way to North America. Most media outlets and the majority of the public didn‘t consider calling her by her chosen name, Lana Kaiser. Philipp Gufler's video installation is a personal portrait of the singer and entertainer.
In Gufler’s video installation The Responsive Body (2019), questions, directed at heteronormative, masculine self-conceptions of an art movement, arise. Gufler channelled texts by the British Op Art artist Bridget Riley into the film and thus provides her with space in an egocentric museum.
The film portrait recounts the social and political repression of homosexuals in post-war Germany based on an interview with 95-year-old Erich Haas, who worked as a receptionist in hotels in Munich after the Second World War.
Philipp Gufler's video installation "Projektion auf die Krise (Gauweilereien in Munich)" provides a kaleidoscopic look back at the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in Germany in the 1980s - a time when Munich's repressive policy against homosexuals reached its peak. The work brings together newspaper articles, posters, photos and press reports from this period. The historical material from the 1980s is commented on by artists.
In this video installation Philipp Gufler grapples with different images and ideas of masculinity that art has produced over centuries: from vomiting, well-endowed Greeks, to the vain Narcissus, towards Andy Warhol’s gun shooting Elvis Presley. The selected images are printed on Lucent fabrics and behind those the artist coquets with masculine and feminine poses: smoking, applying makeup, knotting a tie etc. The reference to the painting “Pygmalion and Galathea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme can be regarded as the ironic highpoint concerning the gender debate: The ancient legend of the gifted sculptor Pygmalion, who, in the spirit of the Male Gaze, carves his perfect woman out of stone, is a perfect metaphor for the creation of a completely artificial femininity, as it is alsoembodied by transvestites. The prefix trans- is thereby symptomatic for the whole staging of the film: the projections and the artist seem to permeate and superimpose each other constantly.
Philipp Gufler was born in Augsburg and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He attended artist residencies at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2015-2017), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine, USA (2019) and Delfina Foundation, London, UK (2021), among others. He lives in Amsterdam and Munich. He is an active member of the self-organized Forum Queeres Archiv München. Philipp Gufler "explores matters of queer imagery, questioning the Western historiography, in which heterosexuality and a binary gender system define the social norm". He spans various media in his practice, including silkscreen prints on fabric and mirrors, artist books, performances and video installations. His artist book and video installation Projection on the Crisis (Gauweilereein in Munich "takes a kaleidoscopic and retrospective look at the early days of the AIDS crisis in Germany". In the ongoing series of quilts, Philipp Gufler refers to artists, writers, magazines and lost queer spaces. The screen-printed fabrics have been exhibited at the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart and at Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism among other venues. In 2020, he produced a short film and a zine about the singer and entertainer Lana Kaiser.
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