Queere Zeitlichkeit(en), HIV/AIDS und performative Kunst (Masterarbeit)

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Resource details

Resource ID

192

Access

Open

General

Topics

Resource Title

Queere Zeitlichkeit(en), HIV/AIDS und performative Kunst (Masterarbeit)

Creator

Oertel, Noora Talvikki

Country

Germany

Date

24 June 2020

City

Berlin

Language

German

Project description

In my thesis I deal with performative art as care, asking how art responds to linear historiography in the German context of HIV/AIDS. I investigate relations between artistic practices, care, images of HIV/AIDS and representations and understandings of citizenship and gender.

My research is framed by three different fields: a contemporary theatre group, consisting of Arabic speaking immigrants who perform HIV/AIDS related prevention theatre in Berlin, an opera association, who presents texts from the American AIDS Quilt Songbook in Germany and the dance event Ein Fest für Orlando [A Celebration for Orlando] that was held in response to the death of a dancer, who died of AIDS in 1991. I discuss these fields while reflecting on ideas about agency of the audience and the victims of AIDS with Theodor Adorno’s philosophy about the autonomy of art (Adorno 1980). Besides my three fields, there is another voice present in the narration: The political, HIV-activist, drag artist Gaby Tupper accompanies the themes from the beginning until the end of my written performance and leads a dialogue with me and my empirical material.

In my analysis I am confronted with the following question: How can art deal with the topic of HIV/AIDS without neglecting the voices and agency of the people that are directly affected by the epidemic? This ambivalence inspired me to tie the concept of a viral dramaturgy (Campbell & Gindt 2018), according to that the performance continues to live across conceptualized temporal borders and virally spreads itself influencing the lives of others in different time periods, with ideas of a fluid understanding of temporality and the agency of the dead who became victims of AIDS. I compared this to the thought of a „celebration of life“ that was raised by my interviewees and seen as a resistance to shame and stigma, which made me, in turn, reflect on the agency of mess (Manalansan 2014), irrationality and emotions enabled by art.

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, relations between art and concepts of care, phenomenology, citizenship, agency, aesthetics and the autonomy of art, mess, emotional archiving, temporalities, lived experience

References
Adorno, T.W. (1980): ‘Commitment’. In: Taylor, R. (ed. & transl.): Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno. London, New York: Verso, S. 177–195.

Campbell, A., Gindt, D. (2018): Viral Dramaturgies HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature.

Manalansan, M. F. (2014): The “Stuff” of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives. In: Anthro-pological Theory 2016, Vol. 16(4). UK: SAGE, Radical History Review, 2014(120), S. 94–107.