Lena Appel is a performance artist and theater scholar. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences at Leuphana University Lüneburg and her Master's degree in Urban Ecosystem Science at the Technical University of Berlin before graduating with a Master's degree in Applied Theater Studies at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. She moves between theater, performance and visual arts and works intermedially at interfaces and gaps that lie between performance, film and photography as media.

Recurring motifs in her work are shadows as a doubling of meaning, the investigation of psychosomatic effects of social and political conditions, as well as collaborations and other forms of relationships on a content-related and structural level. Since October 2024, she has been a research associate at the GRK Normativity, Critique, Change at Freie Universität Berlin with the research project (Un)conscious Relationships: Performativities of Affection, Militancy and Solidarity as Strategies of Resistance in Queer-Feminist Artistic Collaborations.

(Un)conscious Relations: Performativities of Affection, Militancy and Solidarity as strategies of resistance within Queer-Feminist Artistic Collaborations

The research project expands the notion of subversive aesthetics seeing it not just as an artistic or theoretical exercise but as a normative turnover—a disruption and reorientation of perspectives that foregrounds marginalized experiences within the realm of performativity and performance art. By embracing the unconscious, the illogical, and non-linear modes of understanding, the project takes on a queer-feminist lens to explore how imaginative and radical dissent shapes queer historiography. Drawing from performance art’s ability to break down traditional genres and disrupt the relationship between language and image, the dissertation project utilizes subversive aesthetics as a framework to explore new ways of understanding contemporary performances. 

International approaches to surrealism serve as a key point of orientation in this context, but the analysis is further informed by later intellectual developments: the performative turn, postdramatic theater, decoloniality, the rise of queer theory and its criticism in regards to psychoanalysis. The research project introduces and stages an implicit dialogue between these fields of critical inquiry, where new interpretations emerge from their convergence. Under the hypothesis that psychoanalytic influence permeates contemporary performance, the dissertation project traces its symbolic and aesthetic impact, shaping the politics of performance art today. Reading embodied desire beyond normative frameworks involves new formulations from queer theory, while also interrogating the psychoanalytic structures that continue to inform performance practices. The aim of the project is to find a method of analyzing contemporary performance art through this lens and establish choreographic practices around the characteristics of the found results.

 

Research Interests:

• History of choreography and composition
• queer-feminist theory, psychoanalysis, decolonial studies
• Dance studies, performance studies, art history
• Historiography, archives and fiction

Texts

“Orange in Blue: The Premise of the Real in Color, Ornament, and Film”, in: Hunter, Leonie, Trautmann, Felix (eds.): In the Sense of Materiality. Film and Society after Siegfried Kracauer, Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2022.

“Mainstreet Is Almost All Right - Delete to Repeat”, CARTHA Magazine (online), 2021.

“Are All Things Created Equal? The Incidental in Archaeology”, Cambridge Archeological Journal, Volume 30, Issue 1, 2020, Cambridge University Press.

Sophia Yvette Scherer on Lena Appels artistic work in: Gognadze, Tornike, Maaß Paula: Communion 2, Mallorca/Frankfurt am Main: Printer Fault Press, 2024.

Shows

2024 Giants, Parfümerie, Frankfurt am Main

2023 Crater, saasfee*pavillon, Frankfurt am Main

2022 The Last Fish, Mouches Volantes, Köln

2022 Parts, Between Space, Nürnberg

2022 Presentation N°1/Cynthia 466, Frankfurt LAB, Frankfurt am Main

2022 Two Concentric Circles in Negative Space, werkstatt, Frankfurt am Main

2022 Rear Windows, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main 

2021 ersatz, Städelschule Frankfurt am Main

2021 Rotten Tomatoes (part of READ ME), Tracking Distribution, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation

2019/2021 RAUBKOPIE, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm/Thalia Theater Hamburg (Körber Studio Junge Regie)