The artistic research exhibition Odarodle - an imaginary their_story of naturepeoples, 1535-2017 casts, for the first time, a postcolonial perspective on the collection and history of the Schwules Museum*. The exhibition proposes a thought-exercise: that there are problematic associations between the museum representation of homosexualities and the ethnological display formats developed over the course of European colonialism. Odarodle presents the work of 16 artists, mostly Berlin-based, including 10 newly commissioned pieces. These contemporary positions respond to the Museum, its archive, and its practices as both research material and aesthetic medium.

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. 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.

Editor/Curator: Ashkan Sepahvand
Published: 2017
Pages: 228pp
Dimensions: 170mm x 240mm
Cover: Softcover
Language: English
Participating Artists: George Awde, Daniel Cremer, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, Vika Kirchenbauer, Sholem Krishtalka, Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry, Lucas Odahara, Babyhay Onio, PPKK (Schonfeld and Scoufaras), Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, James Richards and Steve Reinke, Emily Roysdon, Dusty Whistles
Graphic Design: Michael Oswell