Exhibition “Purple Mercury Rising –
Intersex Art goes Council of Europe”

Purple Mercury – Intersex Art goes Council of Europe is a small selection of Schwules Museum’s first inter* focused exhibition Mercury Rising – Inter*Hermstory[ies] Now and Then from 2021 and 2022 and is dedicated to intersex movement(s) in activism, society, art and culture, both past and present. With this exhibition, we want to celebrate the Intersex Awareness Week but also highlight the importance of the recommendations developed here for equal rights for intersex people.

The original exhibition fragmentarily explored universes and utopias relating to intersex experience, a subject which has often been, and still remains, filtered through the gaze of dyadic people¹. Mercury, the planet and astronomical symbol, figuratively represents the hybridity and fluidity of sex and gender. With the selection for Purple Mercury, the CoE shall be transformed into a space that houses intersex visions and representations, bringing them into relation with one another. It is a space in which the many distinct voices of intersex people stand in focus and provide insight into their lived realities, as well as a space in which their similarities and differences are embraced and celebrated.

One of the exhibition’s main objectives is visibility for intersex people or, more specifically, an autonomous, self-determined representation. Visibility, including the reflection of gender and sexual diversity within the team, demonstrates the important role that allyship can and should have in activism and art. A sense of togetherness and mutual support is at its core, as well as an awareness of intersex movements, both past and present. As part of this awareness, we place great importance on elevating the voices of the artists, empowering them to explain and describe their own work, and to make their feelings understood by visitors to the exhibition. For a long time, the voices of intersex people have been suppressed and not taken seriously. The exhibition therefore avoids taking an outside perspective, instead giving intersex people and their allies the opportunity to speak out through visual and textual mediums. The critical reappropriation of photography by intersex people, now using it as a medium for determining their own presentation of self, disrupts the previously medicalised history of photography and inter* people. Free to proudly express their existence and their bodies in all their rich diversity, lived history is reflected and rewritten.

The viewer‘s gaze is consciously guided, and often mirrored or forcefully returned. Who is looking at whom? Where are you looking? And with whom does the power of the gaze lie? It is important to us that the plurality of inter*communities, their various contexts and their global connectedness is reflected in the exhibition, and that, through this, we learn from one another and expand our white, Eurocentric perspective. We want to highlight that inter* people indifferent geographical locations, cultures, and time periods have experienced/differing levels of visibility and have led unique emancipatory efforts to carve out their place in society.

1. Dyadic or endosex are terms that describe people who are not inter* ↩︎