Janis Löhrer – Right Place, Wrong Time

Opening: November 1, 2025, 7 p.m.
Duration: November 2-30, 2025

Greeting: Prof. Ilka Helmig (Chairwoman of the board NAK)
Introduction: Maurice Funken (Director NAK)

Janis Löhrer‘s artistic practice deals with questions of queer identity, space and body, masculinity and shame. In his first institutional solo exhibition Right Place, Wrong Time, which will open on November 1, 2025, at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein as part of the series Young Art Euregio in cooperation with STAWAG, Löhrer will present a site-specific installation on the upper exhibition floor consisting of a multitude of glazed ceramics that appear to be scattered randomly throughout the space, as well as a large communal ceramic shower, which the artist has recreated in detail, complete with a tiled wall, handmade shower fittings, and soap dishes.

The works draped around the room are ceramic replicas of everyday objects that one might (or might not?) find in such a place: dirty sneakers and various items of clothing, mostly black – from sort trunks to caps to jockstraps – all of which appear to have been worn, but give no indication of who might have owned them. This anonymity provides an intimate insight into a parallel world with explicit queer connotations, whose codes and structures are not known to everyone and are usually overlooked. The communal shower as a place without hierarchies, a democratizing equalizer, freely shedding all shame, and beyond that, a charged utopia of queer desire in contrast to the often banal reality of such originally pragmatically conceived spaces. A paradise, if you’re looking for it.

In the second exhibition room, Janis Löhrer brings together a series of new drawings that can be interpreted as subtle references to specific spaces. Here, it is the location itself that is no longer depicted; instead, detailed ink drawings of air conditioning systems, grilles, and even drains take its place. Mostly kept quite dark, with dirt and impurities given space, these drawings reshape a place. Löhrer reduces the omissions of all other structural elements, such as walls or doors, even more here than in the expansive ceramic installation, deliberately placing such gaps at the center of attention. An imprecise space, but one full of possibilities.

The new works were created during a residency in Turkey lasting several months; here, too, Löhrer explored places occupied in parallel and reduced their structures to ambiguous traces of queer life, whose code the artist also had to rework in an environment that was undoubtedly not Western in character. The drawings, which again appear contextless at first glance, point to a field of tension between inside and outside, exploring the idea and possibilities of accessibility and belonging, especially in the face of restrictive societies.

The presentation at the Kunstverein is rounded off with a new ceramic work by the artist. Janis Löhrer has recreated a urinal from a public toilet, undoubtedly another charged location for secret encounters and silent glances, deliberately positioned here in plain view.

Right Place, Wrong Time plays with the idea of a conscious, perhaps even saddening spatial and temporal displacement in its title. The exhibition space becomes a transient place that echoes the character of public toilets, bathhouses, or parks, without, however, placing the expected protagonists of these social spaces, who are read as male, at the center of the presentation. These interstitial spaces represent intimacy and publicness in equal measure, simultaneously expressing an interplay of social norms and secret practices. In these spaces, Löhrer explores ideas of vulnerability, the boundaries of shame, desire, and community.

In a cultural history of queer desire, the places evoked in the exhibition are those that explicitly function as meeting places for people who otherwise have limited space available to them in society. And whatever activities may otherwise take place here, they are not happening in the exhibition space.

Janis Löhrer (born in Aachen in 1991) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 2024, he received the Düsseldorf State Capital’s Emerging Artist Award for Fine Arts. In the summer of 2025, the artist was a scholarship holder of the Kunststiftung NRW in cooperation with the Arthena Foundation for the Artist-in-Residence scholarships at the Galata Studio in Istanbul. Löhrer is one of the founders of the off-space AURA in Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Berlin.

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