Jakob Lena Knebl: Faggot

PRESS CONTACT:

SKYunlimited
Laura Thelen
Tel.: (+43) 1 522 59 39
Mobil: (+43) 699 16448003

E-mail: laura.thelen@skyunlimited.at
www.skyunlimited.at

With the installation Faggot on Vienna’s Morzinplatz, the artist Jakob Lena Knebl presents a temporary memorial to the homosexuals, lesbians, and transgender persons persecuted and murdered under the Nazi regime. She deliberately relies on discriminating terms such as “schwule Sau” (faggot) or “Mannweib” (bulldagger) used disparagingly and deprecatorily in everyday language. He employs these terms in the sense of Judith Butler’s view of the political discourse as performative and her hate speech concept, turns himself and his body into an exhibition and projection surface, and confronts the public in his installation. By appropriating the terms, she deprives them of their offensive impact to which homosexuals, lesbians, and transgender persons are exposed to and forestalls her vis-à-vis’s verbal insults against herself.

Thanks to the aestheticized form of the installation drawing on the design language of Modernism and Midcentury Modernism, Jakob Lena Knebl succeeds in attracting the public’s interest through the “beautiful and good” form of his intervention. She describes her approach as “trickery” – as something that pretends to be something else than the actual content and thus worms itself into the viewers’ attention.

That this worming into people’s consideration is still necessary today makes the installation not only a memorial to the victims of National Socialism, but also to those persons who are still persecuted by intolerance, hate, and professed lack of understanding today.