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Join Us BERLIN — Ruins of Rooms , a fresh take on the multimedia practices of Jimmy DeSana and Paul P. , explores what it means to make and curate queer art at a moment in which the word “queer” — as an adjective, verb, identity — is assigned to a vast, heterogenous, even contradictory constellation of objects, people, and concepts. Drawing together the work of two artists born a quarter of a century apart, curators Krist Gruijthuijsen and Linda Franken explore not just the relationship between their work but the conceptual echoes between their generations.
P. and DeSana each made a single film after graduating from art school, and the exhibition opens with those remarkably similar works. In DeSana’s “Double Feature” (1979), a nude figure, shown from thighs to rib cage, vigorously massages flaccid, soapy genitals in an otherwise dry shower stall.
In Paul P.’s two-decade-later “Snapping Off” (1997), a subject in what looks li.