Snaps from a Queer Angle
Queer perspectives – artistic, academic, activist or otherwise – are gaining increased attention within institutions and public forums engaged in art and (visual) culture. Emerging from a subcultural environment, i.e. often through minority groups and in opposition to prevailing positions in both theory and practice, this momentum is a precarious, at times even contradictory event. Queer discourse poses a substantial challenge to normative structures of the supposedly common, not offering final solutions or relief while being vulnerable to appropriation, commodification, and domestication. This attitude of taking a specific point of view finds an equivalent in the visual form of photography. Through constant artistic or curatorial framing and reframing, however, the medium offers a particular affinity to queer endeavors. Directing the gaze to queer subjects or rendering queer ways of seeing and perceiving thus takes advantage of the inherent qualities of photography as a projective apparatus. This blog series sets out to explore the manifold angles and separate layers by and on which queer leverage might break with the confines of normative frames and perspectives.
Susanne Huber
Susanne Huber works as an art historian in Berlin and abroad. From a perspective of feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory her research is focused on art and culture in European and US-American contexts since the 1970s. She held a position as a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin participating in the DFG-funded research project ‘Aesthetics of Desire. Counter-hegemonic Visualizations of Bodies, Sexuality, and Gender’. Here she pursued her dissertation on the subject of materiality and mediality of desire in the work of the artists Lutz Bacher, Sarah Charlesworth, and Barbara Bloom. Her academic practice is complemented by various collaborative projects that include events such as the lecture series ‘Intensify Desire’ with international participants. Huber is currently teaching at Universität der Künste Berlin.