Research-based artworks and archival materials in a series of theatrical installations.

The project’s primary point of departure is the seminal exhibition Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850–1950—Geschichte, Alltag, und Kultur, which opened in 1984 at the Berlin Museum in West Berlin and is considered by the Schwules Museum* as its institutional origin. The 1984 exhibition’s title referred to the “original” Eldorado cabaret, which was in operation from 1926 to 1933 with two locations in Berlin-Schöneberg. Golden '20s Berlin was full of bars and clubs named after faraway and exotic places. In a befitting coincidence, Eldorado evoked the eponymous Lost City of Gold, one of the many fantasies that fueled 16th century Europe's imperial race for the accumulation of wealth, power, and territory in the so-called New World.

Odarodle specifically turns “Eldorado” backwards. As a site of multiple origins, it is a threefold reference: an historical exhibition, a legendary night club, and a colonial myth. What Eldorado ignored, Odarodle picks up on—that the “history of (homo)sexuality” is deeply entangled with concepts of “natural history.” Though the commitment of the Schwules Museum* to enable LGBTIQ cultural visibility bespeaks a greater political agenda of liberation, the contemporary relevance of such a (self-)representational undertaking requires revision and reflection. A more expansive, less obvious scale of critical engagement, as proposed by Odarodle, considers the deeper operations within Modernity that have attempted to exhibit forms of life, their bodies, and their habitats. This is where the desire to show the manners and mores of a kind of “people” and their “nature” confronts the postcolonial challenges of the ethnographic museum: a site that has historically sought to visualize the existence of the “Other” and, in doing so, maintains the “Other” as a normative construction.

Odarodle elaborates on the anachronisms of the three Eldorados, spatially embedding research-based artworks and archival materials into a series of theatrical installations. Rather than taking a didactic approach to narrating cultural histories, this exhibition deploys artistic research as a sensualized form of thinking, one that welcomes multiple perspectives and unresolved questions. What are the problems and potentials of self-representation? What about a future “queer museum,” one that is able to (re)imagine the histories of elsewhere and the otherwise in a way that complicates the representation of existences?

Participating artists: George Awde, Daniel Cremer, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, Vika Kirchenbauer, Sholem Krishtalka, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry, Lucas Odahara, Babyhay Onio, PPKK (Schönfeld and Scoufaras), Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, James Richards and Steve Reinke, Emily Roysdon, Dusty Whistles

Curator: Ashkan Sepahvand

July 21–October 16, 2017