ANTKE ENGEL /Berlín/ BOSSING IMAGES SUBVERTING NORMALCY THROUGH QUEER CULTURAL POLITICS

In this talk I will present „Bossing Images. The Power of Images, Queer Art, and Politics“, an ongoing series of curated evenings that started in 2012 at the NGbK Berlin. Bossing Images proposes bossiness as a framework through which to foreground the desiring but not always, hierarchical but never fully stabilized power relations that shape the production, reception, and circulation of art. The series draws on Elspeth Probyn’s thesis that desire travels in images, and inspires me to reflect upon artistic practices and queer cultural politics that intervene in regimes of normalcy.

Antke Engel is director of the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin and works as independent scholar in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy, visual cultural studies and queer aesthetics. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University in 2001, was research fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin) from 2007-2009, and held visiting professorships for Queer Theory at different universities. She has published widely on queer theory and visual culture, among others Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie (2009), The Surplus of Paradoxes. Queer/ing Images of Sexuality and Economy, in: Pascale, Celine-Marie (2013), and in e-flux journal.