Daphne – Lesbian Art Salon: Antke Engel (057)
As part of the Daphne - Lesbian Art Salon, Antke Engel comes to us and talks about "Lesbian queerVisions" in a workshop(!).
What is an engaged reading of images that is guided by relationships of power and desire? We go in search of possibilities to talk not about but with artistic works and in doing so to explore what LESBIAN VISIONS can mean from a queer-theoretically inspired point of view. "Ekphrasis as a lustful power struggle" is Antke Engel's term for the way she deals with artistic works and visual material. Ekphrasis, i.e. the precise description of an image by means of language, produces duplications of the image, which opens up access and resistance on the part of the visual material and the viewer. Desire moves in the space between and uses images as a means of transport. If we understand lesbian as an adjective of desire, where does it dock, which means of transport does it choose? And does a lesbian queer seeing emerge in the process?
Antke Engel has a PhD in philosophy, is a queer theorist and works freelance in academia and cultural production. She heads the Institute for Queer Theory³ in Berlin. In addition to numerous essays, she has published the two monographs Wider die Eindeutigkeit (2002) and Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie (2009). From 2012-2016, together with Jess Dorrance, she organised the event series Bossing Images. The Power of Images, Queer Art and Politics.
