Ben Miller

100 Objects: An Archive of Feelings (Schwules Museum)

The Wunderkammer exploded!

With Peter Rehberg, I co-curated this exhibit, running from April to November, 2020, at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, where I have been a board member since 2018. Including work by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marc Martin, Rosa von Praunheim, Alexa Varzhon, Krista Beinstein, Albrecht Becker, Petra Gall, Jürgen Baldiga, Annette Frick, Josè Sarria, Dale Hall, Kate Millett, Jürgen Wittdorf, Herbert Tobias, Tabea Blumenschein (of Die Tödliche Doris), and Derek Jarman, this exhibit intervenes in a mostly-gay archive at a rapidly-diversifying queer museum, one which has typically presented its archival collections in traditional cultural history exhibits with conventional, even didactic, styles of curation.

A dress worn to the Berlin Tuntenball in 1985. On the floor, you can see the colored paths representing the various affects according to which the exhibit was organized.

100 Objects presents our collections in a new way: not according to defined identities or historical epochs but according to affects, to feelings. How does an object make us feel? How did its creators feel? Its original audiences? What do visitors feel today when they see it? Affects are difficult to localize. They embody forms of knowledge and experience that transcend familiar categories for the experience and archival of history. They set our collective understanding of ourselves in motion. Starting from this idea, we have organized this exhibition along five paths that cross: desire, joy, care, anger and fear.

A close-up of Michele Meyer’s Confessional Booth, a work examining the artist’s complex history with HIV and the Catholic Church.

Following feelings opens up new ways of understanding collections – from recent art acquisitions to classic Berlin drag costumes, and everything in between. Presenting our collection from this perspective brings objects to light and makes connections between them that would escape chronologically and hierarchically-ordered ways of seeing and knowing. It highlights singularities through which new horizons appear: coincidences, correspondences, more doors to the world of queer things. 

The show’s entrance wall, featuring a photograph of Berlin drag legend Madame Kio, a knit sweater with lesbian-feminist motifs, a Crisco sign from a fisting playroom in Berlin in the 1980s, a self-portrait by the artist Jürgen Baldiga, and Petra Gall’s photograph of womens’ protests against misogynist violence in the 1980s.

Not everyone experiences the same thing when they walk through a museum. Everyone will feel differently in front of a given object. Our affective approach is meant to be open to surprises, to stories we didn’t consider or write down. This presentation of queer history and art is necessarily incomplete: it is an experiment, an invitation to experience queer history in living color, to rewrite it, and to dream it forward. 

On the “desire” path… remnants of a paper-stack work by Felix Gonzales-Torres, a sign from a lesbian-feminist bar, and a box of remaindered copies of gay porn magazines that visitors to the exhibit are free to take home with them.
Desire and anger intersect: a drawing of a lion sodomizing a classic 1970s ‘clone’ sits next to a dress worn by the San Francisco drag queen and political activist Josè Sarria and posters from Berlin’s 1980s and 19980s Lesbenwoche activist meetings.
Chairs, a lamp, and a trophy from Ellis Bier Bar, which was one of the first queer bars in Berlin in the Weimar republic, survived the Nazi period, and became a meetup for leathermen and political radicals like Rudi Dutschke alike in the 1960s and 1970s, Behind, photographs by Herbert Tobias and Annette Frick.