Doctoral Candidates

Hannes Hacke

CARMAH members’ portraits were captured in March 2017, on the ‘New55 PN’ – a new handmade instant film for large format, 4”x5” cameras. This film was launched through crowdfunding in 2014 as a reinvention of the discontinued, legendary ‘Type 55’ by Polaroid. Since the sixties, Polaroid’s unique ‘Type 55’ starred in many artists’ and professional photographers’ projects. ‘Type 55’ provided both an instant print and a superb negative from which more (and larger) prints could be made. Like so many photographic material in the last 10-15 years, ‘Type 55’ was discontinued in 2009. Tal Adler decided to use the ‘New55 PN’ not only for its beautiful quality but also to reflect, and participate in, the revival of (photographic) heritage.

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I am a doctoral researcher at CARMAH currently funded by the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium of the city of Berlin. My research interests include the history of sexuality in museums and collections, with a focus on queer sexualities and LGBTIQ+ history.

My PhD focuses on the history and impact of LGBTIQ history exhibitions in museums in Berlin. I am interested in the way temporary history exhibitions have contributed to rendering visible LGBTIQ+ identities and histories. Looking at three different institutions and decades (Berlin Museum/1984, Akademie der Künste/1997, Deutsches Historisches Museum/2015) I analyze the role the representational strategies, conventions and framings of the museums played in the way LGBTIQ identities and histories were displayed. How did the tropes and conventions of ethnological display of “Others”, of representations of “minorities” in historical exhibitions, the temporal modes of the exhibition, as well as the museum discourse of the time shape the representations of LGBTIQ people as distinct groups? I explore the impact of these temporary exhibitions on the three institutions and trace the documentation of queer objects and sedimentation of queer knowledge. By redrawing the conflicts surrounding these exhibitions as well as the disputes within the LGBTIQ communities I aim to highlight the part these exhibitions played for the development of a specific discourse on the LGBTIQ history of Berlin and Germany.

From 2017 to 2022 I was a research assistant and curator at the interdisciplinary Research Center for the Cultural History of Sexuality at Humboldt University where I worked on a five-year practice based research project on a museum collection on the history of sexuality. My work included curating exhibitions in cooperation with Berlin museums, researching collection histories, documenting and digitising objects, and developing formats of object-based education.

I am the co-founder of the network Queering Museums Berlin and co-founder and board member of Queersearch, the umbrella organization of the queer archives, libraries and collections in the German-speaking world.