From 12 June to 02 November 2026
Susan Sontag's image moves through queer history like a recurring guest: intense gaze, cigarette, a body that never quite wants to behave.
Her photographs hung in many lesbian-feminist flats as more than posters. They marked the possibility that a woman could claim thinking, desire and autonomy without asking for permission.
The Schwules Museum dedicates an exhibition to this double role of Sontag as observer and observed: Susan Sontag - Sehen und gesehen werden / Seeing and Being Seen.
A Bonn show, expanded for Berlin
The exhibition takes up the successful show from the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2025) and extends it into Berlin's own queer memory. A new section explores Sontag's traces in Berlin and asks what her repeated stays in this city meant for her thinking and for the queer scenes she moved through.
Central to Seeing and Being Seen are reflections on visibility, self-presentation and representation. They demonstrate the acute sensitivity to all forms of discrimination and exclusion that Sontag possessed as a queer Jewish woman, even though she never publicly named herself as lesbian or queer.
What is on the walls
Curated by Dr. Kristina Jaspers and Dr. Birgit Bosold, the exhibition brings together film clips, photographs and documents as well as newly produced video interviews with contemporaries such as Ulrike Ottinger, Gesine Strempel, Erika and Ulrich Gregor and Carolin Emcke.
Works by artists such as Jack Smith, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Hujar, August Sander, Ingmar Bergman and The Supremes trace the visual cosmos Sontag moved in and wrote about. Famous portraitists including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe captured her, but so did her long-term partner Annie Leibovitz, whose photographs turn the private into public record.
Around the exhibition
Alongside the show, the Schwules Museum runs free guided tours in German and English throughout the run, plus a Sontag reading circle that works through key essays.
The reading sessions are moderated in cooperation with Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv.
Practical info
The Schwules Museum is at Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin-Tiergarten. Opening hours during the exhibition run: Monday, Wednesday and Friday 12 to 18, Thursday 12 to 20, Saturday 14 to 19, Sunday 14 to 18. Tuesday closed.
Tickets are bought at the cash desk. Vernissage was on 11 June at 19:00.
Sontag Reading Sessions at the Schwules Museum
Three close-reading sessions accompany the exhibition. Each one takes a segment of the show as its starting point and opens into broader theoretical discussion. Small group, facilitated, in English. Seminar-style, intimate, intellectually serious.
On Thursday 6 August 2026, from 17:00 to 19:00, Rachel Pafe hosts a session on Notes on Camp.
All three sessions take place at the Schwules Museum, Lützowstraße 73, Berlin-Tiergarten. Free registration, standard venue rules apply. Full details and sign-up are on the Berlin Kink Calendar event page for the Sontag Reading Sessions.
Why it belongs on the Berlin Kink Calendar
The Berlin Kink Calendar does not only track parties and play spaces. It also tracks the exhibitions and archives where queer thinking gets stored, contested and passed on.
For Sex Searchers, Sontag is a useful reference point. She wrote about photography, illness, war and desire in ways that still shape how we look at bodies, at each other and at the images we produce of our own scenes. Seeing and Being Seen is a chance to ask what her gaze does to ours in 2026, and how camp, visibility and refusal still work as queer tools today.
Before you mark your calendar: always double-check dates, location, and ticket info directly with the organizers.
Even the best promises come with fine print.