Queer.War.Archive
Zeitgenössische Kunst Ausstellung
with
Taras Tolstikov
Vladyslav Plisetskiy
AntiGonna
Danylo Halkin
Anatoly Belov
a.o.
Curated by kishechka paget
Created during the war in Ukraine, the Queer.War.Archive brings together interviews with soldiers and works by artists. The project reflects on queer life at the frontline, both in its physical realities and representational dimensions.
The archive’s participants are positioned within the core of military and biopolitical conflict. Whereas Western intellectual discourse constructs “queer” as hope with varied vectors of emancipation, Russian ideology casts it as a threat and “unnaturalness.” Such a claim sounds hollow in the face of drone warfare and the looming specter of nuclear technologies.
At the level of foreign policy, discourse on the rights of Ukrainian LGBTQI+ people also becomes a form of diplomatic capital. Yet unlike the “homonationalism” of colonial states, this capital is mobilized from below - to affirm sovereignty and the right to govern one’s own body as one wishes, to the extent that political imagination allows.
The Ukrainian community exists in constant proximity to death and the impossibility of long-term planning, yet at the same time is forced to make its own political decisions and take action. In this context, the issue of legal recognition of civil partnerships for LGBTQI+ couples, beyond its practical role as a guarantee of basic security, also takes on symbolic significance.
When we present experiences related to hormones, gender transition, medical technologies, cyberwarfare, or the frontline, we neither imagine technology as a redemptive force for humanity, nor mobilize apocalyptic or suffering-centered affect. This is not a site of alarmism or utopian anticipation. In war, the queer community is not reduced to a struggle for survival but unfolds a production of meanings that we seek to communicate.
The presentation of the archive at hoast includes statements by artists: those who remain in Ukraine, those who became refugees, and those who left before 2022 and now process this experience from a distance. The exhibition unfolds from their expressions.
Founders and curators of the project: kishechka paget & Yana Bachynska/Jan Bačynsjkyj.
The project has received support from: Documenting Ukraine; the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen).