Queer Intimacy 2.0 – Sarah Waschke

In the organizer's words:

Queer Intimacy is a growing installation of textile art by Sarah Waschke, which was first shown in 2019. The installation is a homage to queer, fat bodies that openly live and celebrate sex and eroticism. It also shows how differently queer lust and intimacy can be experienced. Softness and hardness, intimacy and distance, self-love and kinkyness.

In the exhibition 2.0, 12 different works will be brought together at Hansa, creating a new, broader landscape for the representation of "Queer Intimacy".

More about the artist:
Sarah Waschke - also known as @radicalcuteness - was born in 1991 and has lived in Bonn since 2012, studying art history at the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University in Bonn. She has been working with textiles as a medium since 2015. She also works with paper collage (mixed with embroidery), makes feminist zines and, since 2022, Stick&Poke Tattoo.

In her work, Sarah deals with queerness, eroticism and intimacy as a fat femme (= (self-)designation of queer people, originally of lesbian women who appear feminine). Sarah does not want to reproduce the medium of needlework as stereotypically feminine, but to use it as a feminist and activist means of self-determination. The artist shows her view of a feminine side of sex and eroticism, in which fat bodies are soft, pleasurable and sensual. But it is also about a self-caring female gaze and taking oneself and one's sexual needs seriously.

In addition to exhibitions, for example at the Bonn Women's Museum, the HKW in Berlin or at Cheap Art Sensation Bonn, she also holds feminist and empowering workshops as part of festivals, in a museum context, for example at the Bundeskunsthalle or the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, or at other cultural events.