How do queer communities become visible in rural areas? Which invisible connections are activated in the process? And what does community mean here? The Berlin-based artist Paul Niedermayer opens a bar in the garden of M.1 that creates a new space from familiar places: Furnishing elements from local bars and restaurants are recombined and mingle with lighting elements designed by the artist and objects that originate from the former Hohenlockstedt bar “Studio 42”. Places and times intersect, blur and change. This makes the ruptures between different styles, sites and temporal contexts visible, brings their pre-existing, invisible interconnections to light – and shows how familiar the supposedly other can be.

The Queer Bar in the garden of M.1 takes place on three evenings in July and August. It formulates a series with different thematic episodes and thus its own history of repetition and difference. The episodes tell of how queer refers to more than sexual orientation: Queer is political, queer is Pride and Diversity, but also the everyday struggle that takes place beyond these shiny moments.
The Queer Bar creates an ephemeral space that alienates existing self-evident facts and re-describes them with an open-ended outcome. Queerness not only stands in opposition to the heteronormative mainstream, but above all represents a multiplier effect: as an unpredictable, open, intimate play space. In the end, it might be adopted as a model and transferred to other places.

Everybody is welcome, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The bar will be open from 6 pm in the garden of M.1 in Hohenlockstedt. Admission is free and barrier-free.

Paul Niedermayer is an artist and bartender. She works with a focus on visual media and spatial concepts. Central to her work are the political implications of everyday social spheres. Her imagery revolves around the orders that accompany them, whose meaning is shifted through strategies of re-staging and re-arranging. Paul Niedermayer studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin and at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her work has recently been shown at ÆdT - Am Ende des Tages in Düsseldorf (solo), Casino Luxembourg Forum for Contemporary Art, Galerie für Zeitgenössischen Kunst, Leipzig, Museum für Fotografie, Berlin, and Atelier Concorde, Lisbon.