Tim Lienhard, author and director of the multiple award-winning film "When Nothing Works Anymore, Then Gran Canaria", who is showing his gay collages in a special edition here at KUNSTWERK BILDER, is coming into the public eye in Berlin with an exhibition. In a very worthwhile text for this exhibition, he explains the personal and political idea behind his collage art.
Text for my exhibition SEXPLIZIT at Galerie Newman, Kalkreuthstrasse 14 in 10777 Berlin, from April 15 to 4/30/2026
These collages are an attack on a society that loves bodies — but taboos sex. They push back. They show what is hidden.
Sexuality is denied to old men. Their desire is seen as embarrassing, disgusting, or simply no longer existent. The aging male body should ideally not be visible — if it is, then only as a desexualized shell. Pleasure in old age is not accepted as human, but denounced as a transgression. This is not morality. This is disempowerment.
Drag queens are reduced to a decorative surface. The penis is pushed away, taped over, erased — not only physically, but symbolically. What remains is an aestheticized figure without desire: consumable, depoliticized, defanged. The drag queen is allowed to be seen — as long as she neutralizes her sex and defuses her sexuality. Visibility becomes a form of discipline here.
This desexualization is no coincidence. It fits perfectly into a time in which artificial intelligence avoids sexuality, neutralizes it, and deletes it from images — out of fear of mistakes, scandals, and transgressions. What is sold as respect is in truth a new form of censorship. Puritanism from Silicon Valley. The body may be shown as long as it does not claim desire. As long as it does not claim sex.
To the productWe live in a pornographic present: nudity is everywhere, self-exposure is a commodity, the body is content. And at the same time, sexuality is tabooed, defused, erased. Sex is made invisible — in a culture of total visibility, of all things. That is the central contradiction of our time: maximum bodily presence coupled with simultaneous sexual emptying.
These collages refuse this emptying.
They bring sex back into the social space.
They insist that the body is not neutral.
That it desires. That it is allowed to be desired.
Even in old age. Even in drag. Even beyond norms.
The body is political.
Sex is political.
Desire is political.
These works demand visibility not as decoration, but as an imposition.
They show the body with what is systematically taken from it: its sex, its pleasure, its ambiguity.
To exhibit here means: resistance.
To show means: not allowing oneself to be neutralized.
As long as that is still possible.
An appeal for the body — with its age, its pleasure, its ambiguity.
For sex — not as scandal, but as reality.
Tim Lienhard at KUNSTWERK BILDER
Tim Lienhard homepage
Tim Lienhard: The Film - When Nothing Works Anymore, Then Gran Canaria
