Tlön Projects

On Screen

06.12.2024

Philipp Gufler

Curated by: Chris Bestebreurtje and Petra Kuipers
Artist talk by: Sam Steverlynck

Venue: Filmtheater De Uitkijk
Prinsengracht 452, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Starting time: 21:00 (reserve your tickets here)

Becoming-Rabe, 2016, still

On Screen is a new part of Tlön Projects’ Satellite Programme and consists of a series of screenings of artists’ films at De Uitkijk in Amsterdam – the Netherlands’ first avant-garde cinema. The screenings will take place on Friday evenings and start at 21:00. Each evening will be dedicated to the oeuvre of a single artist whose works are part of Tlön Projects’ imaginary collection. The programme was compiled by curators Chris Bestebreurtje and Petra Kuipers in close cooperation with the artists.

Video art has been an integral part of art production since the 1960s. Artists often use the medium more experimentally than mainstream directors. They are less bound by conventions such as commercial film durations or plot and can also present different kinds of narratives. Various perspectives can be combined by working with multiple screens. Or the artists focus on formal parameters such as time, light or the physical characteristics of celluloid. Sometimes other disciplines are involved such as performance, or settings, costumes or music are used which have often been created especially for the occasion.

Although video art is commonly displayed in white cubes, with or without other media, we have consciously opted for a black cube. Watching a film together in a cinema is one of the few collective experiences left in our individualised society. Sat in silence with a group, watching the same film provides connection. And an opportunity for dialogue, as afterwards Sam Steverlynck, curator at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, will talk to the artists. Besides a Q & A after the artists’ talk, the audience can also exchange ideas whilst enjoying a drink in the lobby.

The German artist Philipp Gufler (1989), who lives in Amsterdam, expresses himself using a wide range of media: from films to installations, objects, performances, publications and textile works. What connects this multiplicity of media – that are often mutually interrelated – is years of research into queer portrayals based on archival documents including legislation, police reports, newspapers or queer theory as well as oral histories, personal documents and footage from popular culture. For over a decade now, Gufler has been a member of the Forum Queeres Archiv München, an archive and study centre for the LGBTIQ+ community in Munich that also pays attention to personal or forgotten stories. Gufler himself highlights various events, places, periods and people who played a role in the micro and macro history of the queer movement: from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825 - 1895), the legal expert who was a proponent of gay rights and is known as the first man to ever come out, to underground, 1980’s performance artist Rabe perplexum or the non-binary star of reality TV in the 2000s, Lana Kaiser who elicited a multitude of opinions. Elements from these films such as wardrobe items or props, not only occur in the former, but also in his installations or other spatial works. For the filmed performance Cockatoo Archive (2022) he worked with Johanna Gonschorek; both wear robes that incorporate archival items referring to, among others, the people they discuss. Bringing an archive to life as well as reflecting on the former using a variety of visual strategies including collage or superposition, are recurring elements in Gufler’s practice.

Philipp Gufler studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München and at Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe between 2008 and 2014. Alongside his extensive work at the archive of Forum Queeres Archiv München e.V. since 2013, the artist participated in the Residency Program at De Ateliers in Amsterdam (2015-2017) and was a committee member at Lothringer13_Florida in Munich.

With a multidisciplinary and cross-media mode of operation, Philipp Gufler investigates strategies of predominant historiography and their fault lines, referring to non-normative experience and questions of constructed identities. The combination of textual interventions and spatially perceivable images opens up a web of statements and thoughts though out history, that initiates a dialogue on the human body, desire their social attributions as well as ongoing systematic formations.

For his artistic practice he received the Advancement Award HIV/AIDS of the German AIDS Foundation and was Artist in Residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine (US) and the Delfina Foundation London. Gufler’s work is part of institutional and private collections and has been on show at Kunsthalle Mainz (DE); Bundeskunsthalle Bonn; Haus der Kunst, Munich; W139, Amsterdam; Marwan, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna (CH), Centraal Museum Utrecht; (NL), Vleeshal Middelburg (NL) and De Appel, Amsterdam among others.