Museums are exhausting, rarely providing people with opportunities to rest their bodies as they look at the objects within. In many ways, museums reinforce the idea that value is apprehended and measurable through productive labor and its effects on the body and society.
In fact, museums are colonial technologies that reproduce and naturalize dominant Western ideologies which the museumgoer is meant to labor to embody.
The recent queer-themed exhibition, Leerstelle: Zeit haben. Zeit zählen. Zeit füllen. (Gap: Having time. Counting time. Filling time.) at the Schwules (Gay) Museum in Berlin, Germany, reimagines the museum in opposition to these notions. Bringing together a series of art videos and sound pieces that interrogate queer practices of rest and worldmaking, museumgoers were invited to embody these queer practices of rest by watching and listening to works while lying on beds spread throughout the gallery.
In this talk, Eric Villiers explores the queer curation of this exhibition and take up the hail it puts forth by laboring queerly—by falling asleep in the museum.