The Queerying Bar is a temporary queer social space, designed and operated by students at HfG Karlsruhe as part of the seminar Among Ghosts: Queerying Bauhaus. Located in a converted truck in the HfG lichthof, the bar opens during the Rundgang as a gathering point, a performative interface, and a site for collective enquiry.

Historically, bars have functioned as key infrastructures of queer life—spaces of gathering, exchange, and informal knowledge production operating beyond the reach of official culture. Inspired by this tradition, The Queerying Bar treats the bar as a form of social architecture: a temporary space in which research becomes atmosphere, gesture, and encounter.

The bar draws on research developed during the first part of the seminar, in which students investigated overlooked and suppressed queer histories of the Bauhaus and its legacies—figures who passed through the school without leaving an official trace, spaces that sheltered lives that could not safely appear in public, and forms of collective life that the institution preferred not to name. This research, published on UMBAU, the HfG's online journal, forms the conceptual and narrative backbone of the bar. Rather than presenting findings in a traditional academic format, the Queerying Bar activates, tests, and complicates this work live—through events, performances, discussions, rituals, and participatory encounters designed and hosted by the students themselves.

The bar's visual identity, spatial design, printed ephemera, and programme have been collectively developed across the semester. Visitors can expect a shifting programme of bar-based formats including annotated drink menus, karaoke lecture-performances, performative scores, and collective rituals.

Amongst Ghosts: Queerying Bauhaus is a two-part seminar led by Prof. Charlott Eifler and Prof. Paul Bailey.

Part 1, taught in the Winter Semester 2025–26, developed research into queer histories of the Bauhaus and its institutional legacies through a series of encounters with scholars, artists, archivists, and spaces. Guests included historian Elizabeth Otto (Harvard), performance artists Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki and Raiko Sánchez, HfG colleagues Prof. Line-Gry Hørup, Prof. Simon Sheikh, and local scholar Prof. Nina Rind, curator Erec Gellautz at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, and Oliver Klimpel, Leonie Fischer and Dr. Sylvia Ziegner at Bauhaus Dessau. Student research from this part of the seminar will be published on UMBAU as part of the Rundgang.

Part 2, taught in the Summer Semester 2026, translates this research into spatial and performative practice through the design and operation of The Queerying Bar. Guests Rosen Eveleigh and Sam Dolbear contributed a virtual bar crawl of late night homosexual venues, and HfG colleague Karolina Sobel introduced research into lesbian bars and queer scenes across Eastern Europe. Students have worked collectively producing everything from the bar's visual identity and printed ephemera to its hosting protocols and event programme. The seminar treats design not as the production of finished objects but as a form of social practice: a way of making space for encounters that institutions do not typically hold open.

The Queerying Bar is the seminar's public outcome—temporary, provisional, and committed to the idea that a bar can be a research laboratory, a living archive, and a place where what has been overlooked may finally show up.

Part 1 participants include:
Lucia Böhm
Jessica Kessler
Laura Weser
Asimina Sideris
Sonnwinn Eckhardt
Lasse Peters
Lena Klevenow
Michael Köder
Alissa Christian
Marie Herrndorff
Jule Köpke

Part 2 participants include:
Lucia Böhm
Asimina Sideris
Michael Köder
Alissa Christian
Marie Herrndorff
Jana Trampert
Sonnwinn Eckhardt