Nicht die Letzten. Dis/Continuities of Queer of Color Struggles in Germany

In a mosaic-like, collaborative process, the curatorial team asks: What shapes history? Where do we come together? What do we build upon? What do we pass on?

The exhibition challenges common notions of queerness that are based on the lives of white, middle-class lesbians and gay men. The focus is on Queers of Color – queer people who have experienced racism.

Their stories speak of resistance, but also of spaces of freedom, relationships, desire, and ways of living together.

At the same time, “Nicht die Letzten” examines the museum’s own archive. For over 40 years, queer people and allies have contributed flyers, buttons, pornography, notebooks, and personal items to the collection. Yet Black queer history and the stories of Queers of Color are represented there only in fragments. What makes its way into the archive helps shape which stories – and whose stories – can be told later.

Starting from this gap, Tarek Shukrallah began researching the Schwules Museum's archive in 2021. In 2024, Shukrallah finally published the anthology “Nicht die Ersten: Bewegungsgeschichten von Queers of Color in Deutschland”. The exhibition builds on this work and collaboratively advances the discussion. The Black women’s organization ADEFRA, founded in 1986, and the “Salon Oriental”, a precursor to GAYHANE, are two of many examples that highlight queer self-organization of Color and the need for dedicated spaces. They weren’t the first; they were already here.

The archive is not only displayed in the exhibition but also put to use. In open archive boxes, visitors can pick up materials themselves, make copies at the copier, and add them to the exhibition folder they receive upon entry. Using the “Time Capsule,” they can also deposit a letter to a person in the future into the archive. The exhibition does not see itself as a complete narrative, but rather as working material and a place of encounter sustained by many. They will not have been the last.

The exhibition unfolds in nine chapters: from concrete utopias and self-organized spaces to archives, (chosen) kinship, religion, and spirituality, all the way to desire and a critique of the museum itself. Questions of racism, migration, class, gender, nationality, displacement, and belonging recur throughout. “Nicht die Ersten” dares to look at the big picture without claiming to present a complete or concluded history – and asks what must be passed on so that those gathered here today will not remain the last.

Curation: Tarek Shukrallah

works by

Assima, Madi Awadalla, Jürgen Baldiga, Lina Bembe, Bishop Black, EL BOUM, Fallon Tiffany Cabral, Caritia, Asarela Orchidia Dewi, Samet Durgun, Todd Ford, Kadir G., Manuel Ricardo Garcia, Bert Heinzlmeier, AnouchK Ibacka Valiente, Diane Izabiliza, Venessa Kaiser, Decolonial Killjoy, Bär Kittelmann, Joaquín La Habana, Arjun Lal, Majdolen, Chie Marquart-Tabel, Maksim Mau, Yezenia Mezu, Bita Mills, Faishal Ahabed Nabil, Saboura Naqshband, Rena Onat, Jamal Phoenix, Saida-Mahalia Saad, Ceren Saner, Tejal Shah, Tarek Shukrallah, S Srabonti, Kali Sudhra, Michael Taubenheim, Tinuke Illustration, Elija Tourkazi, Christian Vagt, Jasco Viefhues, Jessica Walter, Akib Zaman

Eröffnung | Opening: 26.11.2026, 19:00 Uhr

Laufzeit | Duration: 27.11.2026 - 17.05.2027