Sex in Public
2018
Installation
Flags for queer cruising sites
2018
Appliqué, velvet, upholstery fabric, satin, cotton, ribbon, woven ribbon, denim, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Clothes for queer cruisers
2018
Appliqué on clothing, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Dyke Action
2018
Photographic series made in collaboration with Line Skywalker Karlström in a performative cruising action at the men’s cruising area near the Teufelssee, Berlin
Courtesy of the artist
Sex in Public
2018
Video collage, 28”00, color, sound
Developed in collaboration with Theresa Stroetges
Courtesy of the artist
Sex in Public is a collaborative encounter between shared practices of queer world making towards the blossoming of shameless queer desire. The works perform a repositioning of public space and the private sphere in relation to the non-reproductive pleasures of getting off.
Analogue sites of social sexual pleasure—public toilets/park bushes/nightclubs/bars—are becoming sanitised under the forces of rising rents and the intensification of human capital, transposed into a digital non-place, rubbing up against a reproductive, domestic present, what José Esteban Muñoz calls the “prison house... of the here and now.” Where do we get off? Queer intimacy and desire are becoming regulated actions, their manifestations monitored in both private and public realms. Lives at the intersections of systems of oppression are threatened on the streets, by lovers, in the bedroom and in the bushes. How do we maintain spaces for shared sensual /sexual pleasure and care when personal safety is at risk?
Gloria Anzaldúa claimed herself to be the “Shadow Beast”, a shape-shifting queer body slithering in the cruisy dark. Sex in Public is a hissing ephemeral moment of queer abundance and potentiality, a horizon in the midst of deprivation, denial, trauma and violence. Through this generative exercise, Sex in Public seeks to activate a colloquialism of queer reclamation, staking ownership to spaces and networks under queer economies of care.
Artist’s Bio:
Emma Wolf-Haugh is a visual artist and educator based in Berlin. Weaving together installation, performance, publishing, and collaborative workshop techniques, she is interested in re-orienting attention in relation to cultural narratives and develops work from a queer/feminist questioning of what is missing. Her previous experience in theatre and queer DIY club scenes has led to a continuing engagement with the aesthetics of club culture, along with questions of spatial politics and an incorporation of theatricality as a means of making propositions.
Text written collaboratively by Daniel Bermingham, Emma Wolf-Haugh and Eimear Walshe for the exhibition Miraculous Thirst, how to get off in days of deprivation, 2018.
Credits
E.W.HAUGH_SEX IN PUBLIC_01 - 04:
‘Sex in Public, Dyke Action, Emma Wolf-Haugh and Line Skywalker Karlström, 2018’
I SLIPPED_Den Frie_Photo by David Stjernholm:
‘Sex in Public, installation detail, ‘I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed’ Den Frie, Copenhagen, 2019, photograph courtesy David Stjernholm’