instinct #2027
SURVIVAL INSTINCT
THREE ACTS. ONE SURVIVAL
Instinct is a non-profit, community-based art project. Since 2015, it has given
queer artists a space to exhibit work that doesn’t always find one elsewhere:
pieces that speak to desire, shame, intimacy, and the social pressures
that shape queer lives.
Instinct isn’t curated from a distance. It grows out of we.are.village,
the community it belongs to, and stays answerable to it.
For 2027, Instinct becomes a year-long project in three chapters:
INVERSION - HOW ABOUT NEVER - SAME BLOOD.
Together they look at what queer communities inherit, not only freedom,
but also shame, fear, and the habits that come with surviving.
A part of the artists shown in 2027 will be selected through an International
Open Call, reviewed by an independent jury, so the program stays open
to voices outside Instinct’s existing network.
Across all three chapters, the questions stay the ones that matter to this
community directly: how we live together, how we love, how we desire,
and what it costs to doany of that honestly.
ACT I INVERSION
Liberation. What’s next? 25 March - 15 July 2027
In the 19th century, the emerging science of sexology coined the word “inversion” to describe homosexuality: a reversal of the natural order, a pathology to be corrected.
This first chapter takes the word at its word, and turns it back on itself. What remains after liberation from that diagnosis? And is that liberation as complete as the official
story claims?
Homosexuality, gayness, queerness, have never stopped being reshaped: by medicine and its pathologizing gaze, by law and politics, by dominant cultural narratives.
Every liberation has produced its own norms. History gets preserved, but it also gets smoothed over. What’s missing from it, what’s contradictory, radical, uncomfortable,
still shapes how we desire and live together today.
“Queer” itself was once an inversion: a slur turned into a weapon, a name given to deviation and disagreement. Today that force risks hardening, into academic routine, into new rules of language, into a consensus that barely tolerates disagreement anymore.
INVERSION answers with a return to disagreement: the pleasure of argument, without it needing to resolve into agreement. Liberation also came with an accent, an American one. The US model of what it means to be gay has shaped queer people worldwide, often at the expense of local languages, traditions, and ways of living. Artificial intelligence, trained mostly on Western, English-language data, threatens to accelerate that homogenization further.
curation Instinct curation team together with Monika Popiel & Paweł Świerczek (Stimpathy)
ACT II HOW ABOUT NEVER
Desire Without Delivery 25 August - 15 October 2027
Queer sexuality was never just a private matter. It was always also a response and a provocation: a reply to prohibition, pathologizing, and social control. Cruising, fetish, sex work, excess, these created spaces where bodies escaped the rules of propriety to invent new forms of pleasure, intimacy, and community. HOW ABOUT NEVER continues from instinct #21 UNVERSCHÄMT, which examined shame as a tool of social control and shamelessness as a strategy of reclaiming the body.
This second chapter asks a simpler and more uncomfortable question: what if all that excess mostly serves to avoid the essential? We push the body to its limits, risk, performance, chemsex, expectations, experiences repeated over and over, encounters that never lead anywhere, precisely to avoid facing what we’re actually looking for: to be chosen, to be loved, to be stayed with. The princess syndrome didn’t disappear with dating apps, it just reconfigured itself into an endless loop of possibilities that never materialize.
This avoidance isn’t only individual, it gets passed down. Persecution under Paragraph 175, the silence and grief of the AIDS years, the absence of an entire generation of elders, taught many that it was safer to desire without waiting, to consume without attaching.
The chapter refuses any easy morality: it isn’t desire that’s the toxic inheritance, it’s what we avoid behind it. Instinct also reconnects with its own history here: instinct #5 was already titled self destruction poetry.
curation Instinct curation team together with Bruno Podrug
ACT III SAME BLOOD
The third chapter closes on World AIDS Day and addresses the deepest shared experience in queer history. From the death-fear of the 1980s, through the first, often toxic treatments with AZT, to PrEP today, what was once a death sentence became a treatable condition. What medicine couldn’t heal are the traces left behind: grief, guilt, stigma, and a fear that shaped an entire generation.
The AIDS generation lived through a virus that was unpredictable, uncontrollable, unjust. It struck anyone, and it struck no one in particular. Today’s generation faces something that looks nothing like a virus, and yet behaves like one in its own way.
Chemsex doesn’t arrive by chance. It’s chosen, repeated, sought out, and still it reshapes the brain until choice stops feeling like choice.
SAME BLOOD doesn’t equate the two crises. It asks what they have in common: a community carrying a harm it isn’t allowed to name, let alone show. It also remembers that the AIDS years produced one of the most remarkable forms of collective self-organization queer communities have ever built.
curation Instinct curation team together with Bruno Podrug