Philipp Gufler: Confessing Weakness
13. 7. – 31. 8. 24

Philipp Gufler’s works combine past and present strands of vulnerable life-worlds. His detailed study of images and stories, based on archives, radio and TV recordings, literature and pop culture, proves to be a sensitive strategy for exploring various kinds of relationships. He works with diverse narrations and media, such as silk-screen printing on fabric or mirrors, film, performance and artist’s books.

The solo exhibition Confessing Weakness, in the Galerie Kunst im Traklhaus, brings together some of Gufler’s central works, in which – beyond simple attributions of roles and identity – he embarks on a careful examination of the socio-cultural mechanisms, as well as historical and political events, that stand for nonconformist sexuality and gender awareness. Naturalised concepts of modes of life become unsettled, weakened, and fall apart, when Philipp Gufler exposes unknown narratives and perspectives through his many years of working with self-organised archives such as the Forum Queer Archive Munich (FQAM). Gufler sees archives as self-organised spaces for movement and encounters, their potential lying in the empathy and appreciation they show for the stories of contemporary witnesses, preserving them from oblivion. By apprehending and accepting supposed gaps in alternative historiography, the artist interweaves aesthetic, historical and political discourses on diversification.

In his works, Gufler sees history and identity as dynamic concepts of fluctuating inscriptions and interrelations. Central to his praxis is a personal approach which, in his activist artistic exploration, deals specifically with the contradictions in the annalistic documentation of events and historical personalities. His sensitive approach in the artistic process evinces close understanding of diverse experiences, enabling him to reflect and expose the motives behind established, long-since internalised narratives. He also negotiates his own body as the subject of numerous inscriptions, and thus the risk of his own vulnerability.