3-channel video installation

Radicals in Between Trees and Dicks examines queer resistance, public space and secret intimacy in post-Soviet countries. The three-channel video installation is based on Agil Abdullayev’s long-term research into cruising culture in Azerbaijan and its neighbouring regions. The work highlights how public spaces in the region are only partially commercialised, allowing for intimate encounters – while state and social repression remain omnipresent.

The installation unfolds across three video levels, combining performance, oral history, and poetic re-enactment. One level documents cruising spots – parks, woods, abandoned buildings – that appear as both sanctuaries and surveillance zones. Their emptiness evokes absence and latent queer history at the same time. Another level collects anonymised stories of “firsts”: the first time cruising, the first time visiting a darkroom, the first time feeling a profound sense of belonging. These recollections shift between euphoria, danger, and a precarious sense of security. The third element of the work depicts choreographed bodies, slow-motion movements and text fragments – abstract translations of queer resistance.

Abdullayev also references Soviet-Azerbaijani films from the 1950s to the 1970s, such as The Tempestuous Kura and Dada Gorgud, which contributed to the formation of national identities and reinforced rigid notions of masculinity. The performers relate to these cinematic references while their movements are captured on a blue-lit dance floor. The dance scenes and collective choreographies reveal subversive undercurrents that are incorporated into the production. The installation oscillates between documentation and abstraction, between testimony and poetic hyperbole. It demands active engagement with the gaze – similar to the hidden gestures of cruising – and questions how queer communities appropriate and transform public space. This creates a vision in which intimacy and resistance are inextricably linked.

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Witnessing Witnessing