Within the framework of the group exhibition Paranoid House, Vleeshal organized a film screening and reading with Philipp Gufler.

The exhibition Paranoid House takes its title from the eponymous audio work by Becket Mingwen, one of the five participating artists. All engage with the subject of paranoia in a free and associative way, while asking questions about themselves as artists and the world surrounding them. The obsessions or suspicions they experience when it comes to truth versus fiction, private versus public and intimacy versus perversion can be seen, read and heard in the exhibition.

During this public program Philipp Gufler did a reading from his book Indirect Contact (2017). These texts were also visible in his work Orbiting of the Novel, which was on view in the group exhibition. In his book Indirect Contact, Gufler allows historic figures and contemporaries to meet outside the boundaries of chronological order. Gufler gives them an indirect voice in the form of appropriated fragments (which cannot be identified as citations in all cases). In this process of indirect writing, Gufler repeatedly seems to merge with his characters. The persona that links all 21 chapters is Jäcki, based on the gay flaneur and writer-protagonist from Hubert Fichte’s novels.

After the reading, Gufler's film Projection on the Crisis (2014) was shown. The film grants a kaleidoscopic retrospect on the beginning of the AIDS crisis in Munich in the 1980s. The video bring the spectator to a classical white cube setting, where Gufler presents documents collected from the archive Forum Homosexualität München and complements them with recent works by artist friends. Directed by Gufler, the camera exposes the social debates about sexuality, love, morality and death.

Documentation of Philipp Gufler's reading is available here.