Gay bar paderborn

The 21 best gay bars in Hannover

Typical of the atmosphere of the Panorama Bar, located on the second floor of the Berghain in Berlin, is a combination of electronic music, drugs, ecstatic dance moves and hundreds of people. The perceptual disorder of the revelers is fostered not only by drug consumption, but also by repetitive music, the fast-flashing strobe light and the mist on the dance floor.

Objects flicker, blur, and dissolve, and even those who are joining in the dance are transformed into artificial figures. On the opposite side of the bar, on the wall above the dance floor, comprising a total length of twelve metres and gay width of two metres, two abstract images hang above the heads of the party crowd Figure 7.

The surfaces of both images are covered by bundles paderborn dark lines, running like a stream through a mostly blue-coloured space without a quantifiable depth. Most of the lines are connected with other lines, resulting in dark line- formations that create spaces with complex structure. On the adjacent wall to the right, next to the two abstract images, hangs another image that shows an uncovered human genital area Figure 7.

What exactly is this constellation between abstraction and figuration about? What happens in this paderborn Left on the wall: Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer right; right on the wall: Wolfgang Tillmans, nackt, These abstract images in the Panorama Bar are dependent on individual and social contexts that construct and structure their meaning.

In contrast to the context of art museums, with their White Cube conditions of neutrality and calmness, bar reception in a club like Berghain is a totally different one: here the music and lights, together with the drugs, suggest other attentions, arouse different expectations, and stimulate other behaviours.

As I will elaborate below, it is this contextuality of the work that calls for a paderborn kind of analysis, an oppositional reading strategy that combines a semiotic with an affective approach, thus fusing critique of representation with the potential of fantasy and desire in the process of reception. Starting from queer art studies and its critique of identity gay visibility politics, 1 the overall aim of this article is to find out to what extent the constellation of abstraction and figuration in the Panorama Bar intervenes in normative discourses bar sexuality, gender, and desire.

In order to be able to decipher possible pictorial statements, I conduct a twofold analysis. On the other hand, I critically re-examine the modes of representation. What is the purpose of this visibility? Who are the target recipients of this visibility? And what remains excluded? What is made invisible by visibility?

In short: what is the what, who, and how of visibility? Similarly, inStuart Hall, in his analysis of intertextuality in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices Culture, Media, and Identitiesargues that no meaningful element should be considered detached from its context and its interaction with other texts, images, and signs Hall Meaning, therefore, is constructed by the totality of all signs; that means signs stand in constant interdependence to one another and their embedment in different contexts is linked to different concepts of knowledge.

Of particular interest for me is the ability of signs and visual expressions to break with contexts and to gay new contexts. As I will show, in the case of the Panorama Bar, it is the interdependence of different image realities, which, as a performative strategy in the process of reception, not only entails anticipatory and transformative potentialities, but also empowers the viewer to engage in queer reading.

Queer theory, as I define it, is a post-identitarian mode of thinking and articulating difference bar referring, though never limited, to gender and sexualitywhich underlines the transformative moments of representation and investigates the dynamic interplay of power and desire in social and cultural relations.

Consequently, it is my aim to produce ambivalences instead of smoothing them out into a reductionist interpretation. What is set in motion? How do movements of desire take place?