QUEER TALKS: Queer Communities

Wed, 9.3. 2022, 3 to 5 p.m.

Lukas Gritzner (Vienna), Christiane Erharter (Vienna)

As part of the soft opening

How do queer communities make themselves? How have they grown historically? How are they constituted? What role do diversity, migration and discrimination structures play for the communities? How do we work for and with communities?

The multimedia installation “until we meet again” by Lukas Gritzner forms the setting for the QUEER TALKS series of talks and functions as a stage and studio. In the summer of 2021, it was the venue for FRUITFEST, which included performances, talks, concerts and DJ sets. FRUITFEST was conceived and organised in 2021 as a multimedia event jointly by mirabella paidamwoyo dziruni and Lukas Gritzner, and is scheduled to take place again in 2022. The focus is on queer art and culture. FRUITFEST is a festival for queer community building. Based on the artistic-research work of Lukas Gritzner, the question of how the idea of communities finds its way into this debate will be explored.

Lukas Gritzner is a multimedia artist living in Vienna. He studied site-specific art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His works are sculptural and multimedia installations that have a poetic and social character. Aesthetic and theoretical references are various queer subcultures, ranging from drag to fetish to gay skinhead culture. In 2021 he co-founded and -organised the queer community platform FRUITFEST. www.fruitfest.club

Christiane Erharter is an artist, curator and cultural scientist based in Vienna. She studied with Gunter Damisch at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and post-graduate Critical Studies at Lund University. She has been involved in queer art and cultural production, as well as queer curating, for many years. Since 2018 she is curator for community outreach at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere and organises, among other things, the annual event series “Queering the Belvedere” during Pride Month June.

She has curated exhibition projects in Austria, as well as internationally in Barcelona, Bratislava, New York City, Warsaw, Venice, Zagreb, and has published widely, including co-editing “Pink Labor on Golden Streets. Queer Art Practices”, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015.