Vienna Queerstories

2022

As the history of a subculture, queer history highlights historical gaps. Representations of queer ways of life were, as per prohibitive Austrian laws, overwhelmingly ignored in film and television well into the 1990s. The abolition of the complete ban on homosexuality in 1971 was followed by four new paragraphs in the penal code, including a ban on advertising and clubs that lasted until 1996. This makes ephemeral audiovisual traces of the LGBTQI+ community even more meaningful (from home movies to club films and activist videos). These films and videos are resources for emancipatory utopias of subjectivity, sociability, and collectivity. Under the working title of "Rainbow Films," they have served at the Film Museum to consider questions relating to curating and visual ethics. They form the starting point for the project Vienna Queerstories – a collaboration with the department of Applied Photography and Time-Based Media at the University of Applied Arts.
 
While queer ways of life proliferate today and benefit from more public visibility, they are also confronted by a new wave of homo and transphobia. In the everyday work of applied photographers producing images, publicly accessible images pose the question of how queerness, gender, corporeality, and sexual identity can be portrayed outside of cliches. They have looked for possibilities in free, miniature films inspired by glimpses into the collection. (Katharina Müller, Caroline Heider / Translation: Ted Fendt)

With works by: Muhassad Al-Ani, Magdalena Chan, Aaron Gaab, Roozbeh Gholami, Benjamin Laabmayr, Olesya Parfenyuk, Jessica Roes Meilland, Lukas Thüringer, and Moritz Franz Zangl.
 
Date of the public presentation: October 8, 2022