Film Screening and Lecture by Christian Liclair (DE)
Cruising, Pleasure, and the Architectures of Sex
Richard Hawkins’s Filmic Work

Taking place in an architectural space shaped by sexual encounters, this evening focuses on the spatiality of sex – not just as a context, but as a method. Cruising through a selection of Richard Hawkins’s recent digital, sexually explicit films, art historian and art critic Christian Liclair explores how architectures of desire and pornographic formats become grounds for aesthetic inquiry and embodied knowledge.

Hawkins’s films draw on material from OnlyFans accounts and amateur cam aesthetics, splicing them into collaged, almost painterly compositions that are as much about texture and affect as they are about form. These fragments are layered with references to art history: from Forrest Bess’s mystical self-operations to Pierre Bonnard’s sensuous surfaces to Antonin Artaud’s theatrical excess. What does it mean to historicize porn through montage? How do formats like OnlyFans – intimate, uneven, self-produced – relate to the legacies of artists often dismissed for being too decorative, too emotional, too immersed in feeling?

At the centre of this evening lies ultimately a question of space – not just pictorial space, but the shifting terrains through which desire moves: the sex club, the digital platform, the streets. Like Hawkins’s films, sex clubs are not necessarily structured around fulfilment, but around rhythm, delay, misfire and saturation. Their temporalities mirror those of cruising – wandering, recursive, embodied. This mode of engagement – neither analytic nor narrative – shapes Hawkins’s aesthetic approach. Moving from the historical entanglements of pornography and modernist painting to the affective choreography of cruising and the visual grammars of OnlyFans, this evening dwells not so much in resolution, but in erotic tension.

For the event Cruising, Lust and the Architecture of Sex, the clubhouse will be open also for event participants who are not members of the association, subject to prior registration at vermittlung@kunsthallewien.at.

The event is for people aged 18 and above.

Free admission.

Hard On

Hard On is the clubhouse of the Leather & Motorbike Community Vienna (LMC Vienna) in Vienna's 5^th district. LMC Vienna is an Austrian non-profit association and has been a driving force in the gay fetish community in Vienna and Austria for 40 years.

Please note that the Hard On is accessible via a few steps in the entrance area and is therefore unfortunately not completely barrier-free. If you require mobility assistance on site, please indicate this when registering. We will endeavour to find a solution. There are seats and standing room at the venue. The toilet is gender-neutral. Drinks are cash only.