curated by carrick bell

Soufiane Ababri
Elijah Burgher
Keturah Cummings
Dakota Gearhart
The Institute of Queer Ecology
Doug Ischar
kg
Liz Rosenfeld
Pacifico Silano

Berlin Art Week open hours, 17-19 September, 12-18h

I’ve always loved Hasenheide because it feels like a park that is a microcosm of our city (which is what any public space should be). It is for everyone (which emphatically does not mean it is utopian - it is a microcosm of all of our structural ills, too), even if everyone there doesn’t necessarily wish it were for some particular parts of everyone who might be next to them. If you are so inclined, there is a gathering of bushes, an aboveground rabbit warren, where you can have sex - with someone you’ve brought, or arranged to meet, or will find, or bump into. You can watch, or you can simply lay in the adjacent field, enjoying knowing that there is a chance that sex is happening nearby, taking pleasure in that potential, a voyeur of the possible. One night, out to observe the numerous parties that happen here in the summer now, I inched my way between these bushes, using what little moonlight there was to navigate toward the sounds of a party I heard coming from the other side of the growth. I came upon another person and, somewhat dramatically, yelled out in shock. Before I even yelled, it was clear that he and I were here for different purposes, something he confirmed when he just mumbled schade as I walked past, each of us occupying the same skinny path for different ends. I was just passing through, he was aimlessly seeking...someone particular, not yet specified. Our physical co-presence did nothing to change the fact that we were in completely different places, one of us looking, one of us unterwegs.

n o w h e r e started in response to this surge in outdoor activity, asking what we could possibly designate as specifically queer relations to nature and landscape. Initially conceived as looking at two archetypal forms, the commune and the cruising ground, the exhibition focuses on cruising as a site, methodology, and social relation. The past year has made me think more about the role of “nature” in the queer imaginary, and different ways these imaginings can provide sites of escape but also create a rhetoric of demonization (queers as unnatural) or further narratives of settler colonial logic (fueled by hallucinations of a pure or uninhabited nature). The artists in n o w h e r e approach this with varying degrees of directness - some, for example, make work using the model of cruising as a means of knowing a space or person, for imagining how anonymous encounters can open us to the world. Others more directly document the flora and fauna that witness and situate queers, often going so far as to reconfigure cruising not as a relation between people, but between people and environments, with setting becoming its own agent and character.

Horse & Pony’s 2020-2021 exhibition program is supported by Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture and Europe n o w h e r e is funded by the NEUSTART KULTUR Special Funding Program administrated by Stiftung Kunstfonds