Olympia Bukkakis – The Work of Drag

On December 20, the Kunstraum and the Center for Critical Studies are pleased to host a workshop, guided by drag artist and choreographer Olympia Bukkakis. The workshop will attend to the work that goes into drag and the material conditions of a performative practice that purposely blurs the site of its production, whether that’s the stage aka the factory, gender or the scene. Haunted by the spectre of autonomy, drag like all art, “expels labour and declares a formal freedom from it while being just as subordinated to capital as any other form of social production” (Vishmidt and Stakemeier). The art of Bukkakis, in turn, insists on a formal nonseperability of the right lipstick, Marxism, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and her friends and collaborators, making her the perfect interlocutor for thinking about art’s surpressed and/or neurotic relationship to theories and politics of labour. Internationalist Drag Union, when?!

The workshop will be structured around two short texts chosen by Bukkakis and circulated beforehand. To participate, please register by writing to kunstraum@leuphana.de by Friday 15 December.

Olympia Bukkakis, Königin des Himmels und der Erde, Kaiserin der Verzweiflung und Architektin deines ewigen Leidens, ist eine Drag Queen, Choreografin, Moderatorin und Autorin, die in Berlin lebt und arbeitet. Seit ihrem Abschluss des SODA-Masters am Hochschulübergeifenden Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT) hat sie eine Reihe von Arbeiten uraufgeführt, darunter Gender Euphoria (2019), Work on Progress (2019), Under Pressures (2019), A Touch of the Other (2020), Too Much (2021) und replay (2023). Ihre Praxis ist im Spannungsfeld und an den Schnittstellen von queerem Nachtleben und zeitgenössischem Tanz und Performance angesiedelt und von diesen inspiriert.