How does the "hardcore" image function as an index of a total political and social collapse? In this dialogue, we interrogate the biopolitical ruptures of the post-1989 era with curator and researcher Elisa R. Linn (she/they).
Her/their landmark exhibitions—Border Thinking and Striking the Border: Migratory Aesthetics and Counter-Public Spheres in the GDR, presented as part of On the Origins of the 21st Century or the Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, as well as at the University Gallery of the Angewandte in Vienna—function as a visceral archaeology of the gaze. By mapping the transition from the state-sanctioned socialist Bruderkuss (Brotherly Kiss) and the queer-diasporic emancipation movement to the raw, unpolished market of Eastern bodies in gay pornography, Linn (she/they) reveals the post-reunification era not as a site of liberation, but as a space where the body transforms into a primary commodity within the violent transition toward the tyranny of exchange-value.
Drawing on her/their exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the University Gallery of the Angewandte in Vienna, as well as her/their PhD research, Linn interrogates counter-public and migratory aesthetics in the German Democratic Republic and beyond. This work traces how the aesthetic strategies of “border thinking” (Gloria Anzaldúa/Walter Mignolo) challenged and reconfigured normative understandings of identity, the body, sexuality, and civic belonging amid the AIDS crisis, the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War, and the volatile transition period of reunification.
The transition from the socialist Bruderkuss (Brotherly Kiss) to the "hardcore" pornography of the 1990s represents a shift in the visual lexicon. How do you think the collapse of the GDR physically altered the "spiritual sensorium" of the East?
Elisa R. Linn: The Bruderkuss occupied a paradoxical space: a public display of male bodily closeness that remained ideologically coded as fraternity rather than desire. Dagmar Herzog, as well as Josie McLellan, note that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) used sexual policy to demonstrate its supposed social progress. Although the GDR was relatively liberal in some aspects—such as access and rights to abortion and sex education, as well as the 1968 abolition of Paragraph 175 and the formal decriminalization of same-sex acts between adult men—the visual culture of sexuality remained comparatively restrained and embedded in social ideals of equality and collectivity. Sexuality was grounded in everyday social practices rather than consumer markets; particularly in the case of non-heterosexual desire, it was often expressed in the private rather than the public sphere.
At the pivotal moment following the fall of the Wall, the "Round Table"—serving as the central reference for the exhibition architecture at the Kunstverein, conceived by Lennart Wolff—symbolized the collective renegotiation of democratic public life in the GDR, while also obscuring practices and positions at its margins. These were not only overwritten in public discourse but also marginalized within the Round Table itself and in the political transition after 1989. This applied, for example, to the vision of a "homo wende" and to the working group AG Ausländerfragen, which advanced proposals for a more just migration policy by demanding equal rights that differed from those later codified in the laws of the Federal Republic after reunification. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, a fundamental shift occurred that reflected not just a change in imagery but a transformation of the “spiritual sensorium”—the embodied habits through which people perceived intimacy, morality, and the body.
As the biopolitical credo of “make live and let die”—which also manifested in the Berlin Wall’s protective function, once described by the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe as the “condom of the GDR”—gave way to a new necropolitical ordering of bodies, new borders emerged as “the primitive form of keeping at bay enemies, intruders, and strangers” (Achille Mbembe). This functioned on a dual axis: on the one hand seeking to prevent so-called “irregular” movements, and on the other ensuring that goods and capital circulate across borders as freely and smoothly as possible.
This marked a move toward a system in which sexuality became commercialized, hyper-visualized, and embedded in capitalist media culture. Let us consider, for example, the ironic mural painted in 1990 by the artist Dmitri Vrubel on a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall (East Side Gallery): My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love. In this work, the artist transforms the kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker into an image of suffocating ideological intimacy—an embrace that appears less fraternal than coercive. Visually, the faces of the two men press tightly together, with Brezhnev appearing to press his lips onto Honecker. The work thus transforms a propagandistic ritual of unity into an iconic visual metaphor for the collapse of the socialist bloc, recasting the language of brotherhood as one of constraint, dependency, and the fatal closeness of a dying political order—marking a shift from symbolic political embodiment to exchange-value.
The Biopolitical Condom: In your research and essays, you describe the Berlin Wall as a "condom"—a semi-permeable membrane regulating both viruses and desires during the Cold War. When this "condom" was dismantled in the 90s, what happened to the Eastern bodies?
Elisa R. Linn: While many citizens of the GDR and West Germany were rejoicing at the fall of the Wall in 1989, and while independent queer associations were soon able to put Rosa von Praunheim’s credo—“Out of the toilets and into the streets,” from his influential film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (1971)—fully into practice, they were largely oblivious to what the future would hold. The Wall’s rubble struck more than two million former GDR citizens—whose lives were marked by unemployment and biographical ruptures within just two years—but especially those who would become the greatest Wendeverlierer:innen, the biggest losers of the 1989 transition.
“The ripping of the Berlin Wall like a condom” (metaphorically speaking) did not simply lead to the collapse of state authoritarianism and the beginning of a new era of “freedom.” On the contrary, the Wall’s rubble struck especially those who were made into so-called “other” Germans—those who were born in the country or had contributed their labor for years, yet were once again classified as the alleged source of societal ills through the discourse of Überfremdung (“over-foreignization”), designated as Germany’s Unwort des Jahres (Unword of the Year) in 1993.
The racist pogroms in Hoyerswerda (1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (1992), along with the neo-Nazi attack on trans activist Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s Gründerzeitmuseum (1991) revealed not only the resurgence of far-right violence—often obscured by the GDR state’s official self-image as an antifascist bulwark—but also the deep vulnerability of marginalized lives in newly unified Germany. Furthermore, Sarah Schulman warned early on about the risks of an assimilationist agenda within the queer movement, which threatened to pave the way for what Lisa Duggan terms homonormativity, and what Jin Haritaworn and Jasbir Puar describe as homonationalism: “a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality.”
After the fall of communism, Eastern Europe briefly became a “Wild West” for the expanding pornography industry, as Western companies moved production eastward where labor was cheaper and regulation weaker. Besides the influential work of William E. Jones, the documentary Not Angels But Angels (1994), directed by Wiktor Grodecki, records how young men—many between 14 and 20 years old—entered sex work during the chaotic early years of the post-socialist market transition. The film’s raw interviews and observational style produce precisely this “unpolished texture”: the camera records bodies not as glamorous performers, but as precarious workers negotiating a newly monetized sexuality.
In a similar way, The Price of Sex (2011), a documentary directed and produced by Mimi Chakarova, investigates how many women from post-communist countries were recruited with promises of legitimate jobs and then forced into sex work abroad. The camera lingers on the emotional aftermath of exploitation: silences, pauses, and close-ups, which shift attention from the spectacle of sex to the human cost of the marketization of intimacy. Together, these films manifest that the commodification of bodies was not limited to pornography but formed part of a broader restructuring of labor markets after the collapse of socialism.
The "moving image atlas" utilizes the low-fidelity aesthetics of the 90s to investigate the origins of our 21st-century gaze. Why is the "hardcore" video economy of that decade so essential for understanding how we consume desire today? What has been lost in the move from analog tapes to digital perfection?
This potential for ambiguity in early VHS and Super 8 film as subversive media—grounded in their function as private, intimate transcripts of sensibilities and circumstances—largely transformed within the hardcore image economy and through a shift in the boundaries between private and public identity that emerged after the fall of the Wall. In this context, liberal debates about gender and sexuality often obscured the material and historical conditions shaping bodies and intimacy, including the roles of sex work, colonial power relations, racism, and the medical and economic regulation of bodies. As Laurie Essig and many others have observed, the liberalization of markets and the growing visibility of sexuality unfold in tandem with a liberalization of sex—though this should not be mistaken for its liberation.
The Illusion of Intimacy: "There is nothing intimate about intimacy" in our era. Looking back at the queer subcultures of the 90s, did the fall of communism delete the possibility of non-commodified intimacy, or did it create new spaces for resistance?
Elisa R. Linn: I think here of the so-called “last Communist,” Ronald M. Schernikau, a figure of passage between East and West—and mythologized as the very last person to emigrate to the GDR one month before the fall of the Wall. Schernikau published his manifesto entitled Fickt weiter! (“Keep Fucking”) in the magazine Siegessäule in November 1984, at a moment when HIV/AIDS sparked heated debates within the queer scenes of both West Germany and the GDR—debates about responsibility, the loss of sexual freedoms, and even a so-called “new gay morality.”
Schernikau’s call to “keep on fucking” cannot be understood simply as a manifestation of an inward-looking and highly individualized mode of hedonism. Rather, it signals a form of worldliness inseparably bound to material conditions. In this view, to “keep on fucking” does not just mean to keep going but, so to speak, to keep making the world despite the many restraints imposed on such life practices. This remains true to this day. For Schernikau, sex and beauty carried a utopian charge as both a micropolitical practice of relating to others and an aesthetic experience—enabling what is not yet actualized to pass from potentiality into actuality by sustaining the imagination of alternative (collective) social and political futures. He would state: “If I wanted to be nice to everyone I don’t sleep with, I’d have a lot to do. So I’m nice to the ones I sleep with. That’s politics.”
Border Thinking and the Future: As a curator practicing "border thinking," how do these 80s and 90s archives help us understand our current conditions? Can the "hardcore" image be reclaimed as a tool for self-determination rather than just another product of the market?
Elisa R. Linn: I hope so. Many of the archival and artistic materials I included in the exhibition reflect a move away from essentialist, linear, or categorical thinking and instead foster a belief in “dwelling in the border” rather than the territory (Walter Mignolo), beyond both the representational properties of state socialism and the market logic of the West. Such strategies might help to transcend entrenched binaries and claim alternative spaces—spaces where identity, gender, and sexuality—and with them democratic community—are redefined from below.