In 1864, the lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs coined the German term Urning (feminine Urningin) to describe his own sexual orientation twenty-two years before Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis popularized the term “homosexual” in medical discourse. A noun for a person with a male body but a “female soul,” who is romantically and sexually attracted to men, Urning was inspired by Aphrodite Urania, born from the froth that sprang up from the sea when the sperm from Uranus’s severed genitals fell into it. In 1867, Ulrichs gave a speech to the Congress of German Jurists in which he defended love between men and publicly identified as an Urning, a member of the “third sex.”
At Nest, a black symbol of the planet Uranus has been painted on the floor. Two vitrines positioned around it display years of curator and artist Philipp Gufler’s research into intergenerational queer histories in the form of books, archival documents, newspapers, as well as photographs and a blue sign for Karl-Heinrich-Ulrich-Platz in Munich. Around these, works by nine artists, separated by temporary walls, trace a constellation of collective efforts for queer rights. Gufler defines their practice as a gesture of “intergenerational care.” Retrieving an historical term originally used as a tool for self-definition here suggests an urgent attempt to reclaim discourse from fascist ideologies that militate against non-conforming bodies and desires. The juxtaposition of original documents with contemporary artworks points to a nonlinear temporality in which multiple generations are brought into a shared intellectual space, suggesting that historical knowledge is not a form of static remembrance but an active resource for survival and resistance in the present.
Directly behind one vitrine are freestanding sculptures by CAConrad, in which the poet’s zigzagging vinyl words swerve right and left, recalling moments of bodily disgust, camp aesthetics, or reflections on the ongoing AIDS crisis. Expanding on the lexical pathologization of queer bodies, one reads, in part: “mourners are / a collective / memory / under / stood / by my 9th / funeral of / friends who / died of AIDS.” Louwrien Wijers’s With Detachment (1977) is a brass sculpture of a pigeon standing beside a stack of undulating pages, which is surrounded by phrases drawn directly onto the wall (“From Competition to Compassion,” reads one). These words of self-determination and pride are anchored by Ulrich’s texts in the nearby vitrines.
A series of drawings by Eli Hill link Ulrichs’s legacy to the twentieth-century philanthropist and trans man Reed Erickson. Inspired by the work of the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), these drawings embody trans-positive images and initiatives as well as references to Ulrichs’s silk farm, founded after he was banned from practicing as a lawyer. In Sharan Bala’s trying not to know is an active process of denial and forgetting don’t forget to forget (2022), a video self-portrait of the artist, who was born intersex, faces a wall-mounted grid of folders and medical documents dating back to the artist’s birth. The documents reveal the cosmetic operations and medical extractivism that were forced on a body deemed at once healthy and unfit for Western society. Bala reproduces the posture of the second-century Roman sculpture Sleeping Hermaphrodite yet, rather than sleep, Bala confronts the viewer, reclaiming an identity that was altered without consent.
Directly mounted on the unpainted backs of the exhibition’s wall panels, Cosy Pièro’s drawings and sculptures exude a punk sensibility through their intentionally messy diagrammatical sketches and layered mixed-media collages. A legendary queer artist who rose to fame as a bar owner in Munich, Pièro has long been one of Gufler’s collaborators, helping to develop his vision of intergenerational community. This carries through in a darkened room near the exit where Gufler’s Quilt #56 (Jakob Rudolf Forster) (2025) records the use of the word “Urning” in Swiss court documents from the nineteenth century, referring back to the archival documents dotted throughout the exhibition. In the two-channel video installation The Beginning of Identification, and its End (2024), Gufler is shown lying naked on a tiled platform while being hosed down. The footage is interspersed with archival videos of early twentieth-century queer life and NASA footage of Uranus—the namesake of Paul B. Preciado’s 2020 book An Apartment on Uranus, which was also inspired by Ulrich’s writing.
Gufler’s exhibition is both an expression of deep academic research and a highly personal testimony to community. Language is figured as both repressive, in medical and legal definitions of the queer body, and a possible source of liberation and solidarity. By showing how the word can be returned to the subject through personal acts of reclamation, these artists express a collective desire for self-determination. At the same time, this show leaves open the question of how different things might be today had an alternative terminology—expressing a more progressive attitude to sexuality—prevailed.
