Unsettled Territories

In spaces that elude a clear vision – in the flickering light of the dance floor or in the protective shadows of parks at night, in darkrooms and toilet cubicles – we enter zones that defy settled structures. As uncertain as they are unforced, these places repeatedly open up the potential to negotiate other ways  of togetherness, moving away from normative forms of violence.  With Unsettled Territories, artists Agil Abdullayev and Killa Schütze venture into these blurred, indistinct realms, interrogating the movement and language of bodies in a world that often denies them safety. A grazing hand, a held gaze or a brief lingering between two bodies. Each can signal the subtle emergence of a cruise in public or semi-public space. A subtle choreography unfolds, marked by risk as much as by desire. This simultaneity of precarity and intimacy continues in the exhibition space, where steel branches stretch across the wall, seeming to both repel and shield uninvited glances.  Moving along the hidden edges of the visible, Agil Abdullayev (re)constructs scenarios in which queer intimacy and desire begin to emerge. Traces of such encounters are scattered throughout the room, captured in ceramics. However, these remnants do not simply remain in the room, they continue to inscribe themselves in the bodies that perform them. Over time, the act of cruising across uneven pavement, stone, or cold tiled floors wears on the body: joints ache, knees tire. Where once hard ground left marks, glazed ceramics now take shape as an intimate artefact of physical relief and symbolic care.  In these works, moments unfold in which the coded languages of public queer desire become tangible. Adullayev lets us stroll through the echoes of these fleeting scenes. As we move between places that have just been in flux, we are repeatedly urged to look around and behind us — at unwelcome glances as well as at those who came before.  But bent joints do not only tire –  they can also cause pain, ward off instead of buckling and mark boundaries. As embodied forms of resistance, five plaster elbows penetrate into the exhibition space. They block the way, pushing themselves relentlessly in between. Here, Killa Schütze explores the gestural grammar of bodily presence as performatively enacted by female-read subjects within hegemonically masculine-coded spaces. The artist operates on a meta-level, where not only patterns of movement become visible, but also the inscriptions of societal power relations onto the body itself are negotiated. Yet Schütze’s works do not frame resistance only through hardness. They also trace moments of care, of vulnerability and release. Photographs accompany moments in which bodies shift out of learned postures of defence – when strength falters and the armour softens. Small actions and intimate details create spaces in which community and vulnerability become tangible: a subtle tattoo, the careful brushing of hair.  But while everything still seems to be at peace in one photograph, this calm is already disturbed in the other. A hand absentmindedly picks at a fingernail – a seemingly still moment, but not without tension. In the subscan technique used by Schütze, vibrating bass of a subwoofer interfere with the scanning process, destabilizing the image. Sound enters the body of the photograph, disrupting its stillness. By withdrawing from compositional control and allowing chance and external forces to intervene, Schütze shifts the act of creation from doing to letting happen. Schütze’s works seem to move along thresholds – and blur them. Inviting and defensive at once, they open moments in which vulnerability is not weakness, but care and strength at the same time.  In Unsettled Territories, Agil Abdullayev and Killa Schütze move together into spaces that offer only fleeting shelter. They remind us that rest, sensuality, and communality have never been guaranteed – they have always been negotiated, often against the grain. In Unsettled Territories, Agil Abdullayev and Killa Schütze move together into spaces that often offer only fleeting sanctuary. They remind us that peace, sensuality and community have always been contested. Their works tell many stories at once: following vibrating basslines, wet tissues and soft footprints, they trace paths beyond linear narratives. Clear borders dissolve – between hardness and tenderness, between physicality and language, between the now and the not yet to come. Here, rejection and strict door policies become caring, protective gestures, as do intimacy and desire. With tightened elbows as sharp edges that protect and bent, tired knees that are protected, the artists give a glimpse into alternative  futures making concrete utopias tangible and perceptible for a moment.