Abstract
Tělák, a Czech slang term for physical education (PE) that also echoes tělo - body, is a theatrical exhibition, developed by an interdisciplinary team of educators, activists, architects, and theatre professionals, introducing expressions of gender as a spectrum for teenage audiences. The exhibition unfolds across two layers. The first is a scenography evoking the familiar spaces of PE; corridors, changing rooms, bathrooms, gyms, reassembled within the museum’s own charged normative setting. The second is an archive of personal stories: fragments of experience retold by actors in sound, and others inscribed in situ by a local artist. This practice-based paper traces the project from the perspective of one of its authors. It considers how the archive itself, the lived experiences of the predominantly queer design team and the spatial framework of the exhibition fold into one another, how the space of display becomes itself archival.
Keywords
practice, body, archive, queering
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2189
Citation
Riha, T. (2026) Body Class, The Grand Museum and the Queer Archive, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2189
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Body Class, The Grand Museum and the Queer Archive
Tělák, a Czech slang term for physical education (PE) that also echoes tělo - body, is a theatrical exhibition, developed by an interdisciplinary team of educators, activists, architects, and theatre professionals, introducing expressions of gender as a spectrum for teenage audiences. The exhibition unfolds across two layers. The first is a scenography evoking the familiar spaces of PE; corridors, changing rooms, bathrooms, gyms, reassembled within the museum’s own charged normative setting. The second is an archive of personal stories: fragments of experience retold by actors in sound, and others inscribed in situ by a local artist. This practice-based paper traces the project from the perspective of one of its authors. It considers how the archive itself, the lived experiences of the predominantly queer design team and the spatial framework of the exhibition fold into one another, how the space of display becomes itself archival.