Ritual of Farewell

The video installation „Een gebeuren“ is based on Ben d’Armagnac’s performance of the same name, which took place in Amsterdam on 14th June 1975. D’Armagnac occupied a glass cube with the dimensions of about 2x1x1 metres, painted white from the inside, together with about 2,000 freshly hatched flies; he began to scrape off the paint centimetre by centimetre in order to at least partially reveal the cube’s inside for the spectators. Gufler reconstructed d’Armagnac’s performance based on rudimentary documented material and conversations with d’Armagnac’s partner Louwrien Wijers. In his own version of “een gebeuren,” Gufler captures the events with a GoPro camera. Instead of documenting the slow appearance of a person behind a white surface the video shows the diligent process of laying bare and opening up from an inside perspective – an action, which Gufler completes by releasing the flies at the end of the performance and by which he also upgrades d’Armagnac’s own performance.

In this video installation Philipp Gufler grapples with different images and ideas of masculinity that art has produced over centuries: from vomiting, well-endowed Greeks, to the vain Narcissus, towards Andy Warhol’s gun shooting Elvis Presley. The selected images are printed on Lucent fabrics and behind those the artist coquets with masculine and feminine poses: smoking, applying makeup, knotting a tie etc. The reference to the painting “Pygmalion and Galathea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme can be regarded as the ironic highpoint concerning the gender debate: The ancient legend of the gifted sculptor Pygmalion, who, in the spirit of the Male Gaze, carves his perfect woman out of stone, is a perfect metaphor for the creation of a completely artificial femininity, as it is alsoembodied by transvestites. The prefix trans- is thereby symptomatic for the whole staging of the film: the projections and the artist seem to permeate and superimpose each other constantly.

Philipp Gufler's video installation "Projektion auf die Krise (Gauweilereien in Munich)" provides a kaleidoscopic look back at the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in Germany in the 1980s - a time when Munich's repressive policy against homosexuals reached its peak. The work brings together newspaper articles, posters, photos and press reports from this period. The historical material from the 1980s is commented on by artists.

In his video installation Philipp Gufler is carrying on his engagement with political, artistic and social movements. In this work, Gufler focuses on the Munich based performance artist Rabe Perplexum, imitating or subverting the stylistic conventions characteristic of the 1980s. The video performance is derived from archival research and includes the original props and costumes used by Perplexum.

The film portrait recounts the social and political repression of homosexuals in post-war Germany based on an interview with 95-year-old Erich Haas, who worked as a receptionist in hotels in Munich after the Second World War.

"For some time now I wanted to shoot a short film about Albert Knoll's tireless self-organized historical work and ask him why he has dedicated a large part of his life to commemorating the crimes against humanity committed during the Nazi dictatorship and what this archival work has done to him. A special focus is on oral history, as I am interested in how, as a conversational partner, one preserves their knowledge and experiences in a certain way after the death of the contemporary witnesses. After Albert Knoll has done so many contemporary witness interviews the last thirty years and was the one who asked the questions, I reversed the situation in the short film and interviewed him." - Gufler

In Gufler’s video installation The Responsive Body (2019), questions, directed at heteronormative, masculine self-conceptions of an art movement, arise. Gufler channelled texts by the British Op Art artist Bridget Riley into the film and thus provides her with space in an egocentric museum.

A video installation composed of a performance by the artist alongside archival film scenes centered on queer and transgender content. Presented across two projections, the film juxtaposes explicit and everyday expressions of non-normative sexuality: from people dancing freely at a lesbian party to Charlotte Charlaque's reverent smile, and the provocative speeches of far-right homosexual politicians. This collage is underscored by a rich soundtrack featuring recitations from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s seminal 19th-century texts advocating for decriminalizing homosexual love, interwoven with atmospheric and pulsating soundscapes by English artist Rory Pilgrim. These elements immerse viewers in a poetic and political reflection on the histories and expressions of excluded sexualities and genders.