Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience), 1987; C prints; 49 x 41 cm. Courtesy of the Artist, Autograph ABP, and nGbK, Berlin.

Mysti is an emerging, U.S.-born performance-based artist interested in “queering theory,” while art star Danh Vo was born in south Vietnam and became a political refugee when his family fled in a handmade boat and was later rescued at sea before settling in Denmark. But both have fathers who were disappointed when their sons decided to become artists. These kinds of divergent yet overlapping narratives are echoed again and again in the transgressive, queer-centric exhibition, where father figures of all kinds are revered and rejected through entirely individual gestures.

At the entrance to the exhibition, the patrilineal status quo of identity is confronted by two self-portraits by Juliana Huxtable, Sympathy for the Martyr (2015) and Lil’ Marvel (2015). Rather than clinging to identity, Huxtable molds it like putty in her hands, shapeshifting into a superheroine or trans-Christ. Her self-aware, Cindy Sherman-like transformations are otherworldly but human, and thus gloriously imperfect. Much like Sherman’s earliest works, the tension between self-determination and others’ projections is well crafted. At the far end of the gallery, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s performative images Under the Surplice (1987), Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience) (1987), and Bronze Head (1987), made nearly three decades earlier, critique the limitations of cultural inheritance through the lens of a queer, HIV-positive Nigerian expat.

Juliana Huxtable. Sympathy for the Martyr, 2015; 70 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and nGbK, Berlin.

Domestic Wish Machine (2015), by Lea St., consists of a few dozen crude salt-dough sculptures rendered in the style of the lost German decorative art form traditionally made by male master bakers. Grouped on high tables are a sausage imprinted with the word “success,” a slice of blueberry pie with “punishment,” a phallic banana with “effort,” as well as a delicate, scarecrow-like hand with “thank you,” and more. Loaded words and equally loaded symbols enter into a slippery free-association game between food and the body—between shame and desire.

Lea St. Domestic Wish Machine, 2015; installation view, Father Figures Are Hard to Find, 2016. Courtesy of Lea St., Heit, Berlin, and nGbK, Berlin.

In a viewing room wrapped entirely in denim, Konrad Mühe’s Fragen an Meinen Vater (Questions to My Father] (2011) is a painstakingly assembled video of clips of the artist’s deceased father, legendary German actor Ulrich Mühe. This postmortem interview is at once comical and devastating, weaving iconic soundbites from film and TV such as, “Death tells us things that are difficult to talk about” and “Please forgive me.” The father’s unwitting monologue to his alienated son invents a conversation many wish to have, and cannot, but its construction further exaggerates his absence.

Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld’s separate small room within the exhibition touches upon illness and how it tests and redefines a father-daughter relationship. Things That Are Not There (2016) was made collaboratively with her father Oskar Curter during weekly visits. A dripping IV infused with anti-psychotics creates a pool on the floor, which reflects a small projection of Curter. A classical watercolor still life of a teapot and a few cups, painted by Curter, hangs on the wall. The rhythm of the drips recalls the uncomfortable, temporal limit built into all relationships.

The curators installed John Waters’ words about his father in vinyl lettering near the exit: “We worked out all our issues, and the issues we didn’t work out I turned into a career.” Even in rejection of the biological, historical, symbolic, or holy father, he is still here, and maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Each of the artists in Father Figures Are Hard to Find has insufficient role models, but out of this lack they empower themselves. Their sensitive questioning acknowledges that there is no “me” without “him,” and confirms the extent to which this shapes them as artists and human beings, a space that can be perpetually reimagined.

Father Figures Are Hard to Find is on view at nGbK through May 1, 2016.

Jacolby Satterwhite, 2014 (performance still); duration varied. Courtesy of the artist and The Whitney Museum, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak.

At NYU, I knew Muñoz within the fairly rigid context of the Performance Studies lectures he often officiated. Take Ecstasy With Me in many ways reproduced this academic setting. Rows of chairs stacked to the back of the museum’s cafe space formalized the event so that it felt more like church, or a wedding. “Welcome to art in a converted museum restaurant,” joked a member of performance collective My Barbarian while waiting for one of the night’s many tech glitches to be resolved.

As we filed into the lower level of the Whitney’s vestibule, video artist Jacolby Satterwhite vogued nimbly around the lobby carpet in a silver suit and helmet, out of which screens protruded like sexualized mushrooms (an iPhone trunk sprouted from his crotch). Under the harsh fluorescents, Satterwhite was one of the most proactive warriors in Muñoz’s army that night. A literal embodiment of theory, Satterwhite’s movements assertively performed queer futurity into existence on the indifferent lobby floor.

Miguel Gutierrez and I.n. Hafezi, p.49 future fuckup, 2014 (performance still); 5:00. Courtesy of the artists and The Whitney Museum, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak.

Other performances stuck closer to Muñoz’s dedication to a manifesto-like lyricism in affirmation of queerness. Juliana Huxtable, for example, stalked around the Whitney stage like a vision, reading highly personal prose rich with feverish dissatisfaction about the ways in which the world still does not measure up to queer vision, queer desire, queer necessity for survival. In everyday life, Huxtable reigns as a nightlife personality in that subaltern space Muñoz so lauded, and she has been instrumental in generating such space for a younger generation of queer New Yorkers.

Choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and I.n. Hafezi’s p.49 future fuckup led the duo through a spectrum of gelled work lights to a soundtrack of tinny glistening noise and ethereal discordant bells. In effortless but rigidly staged movements, they would race around the space, then stand stock still, one hand up, quickly waving with tightly wound eagerness and expectation. Perhaps they waved to an alien ship; perhaps at Muñoz’s fantastic future as it glistened on the horizon. Such waves were among the most resonant attempts to conjure queer futurity into the present, but the audience ultimately left the symposium still straining towards a utopia untapped.

Take Ecstasy With Me is a testament to the Biennial’s effort to amplify those queer voices, technologies, and aesthetics that continue to profoundly nourish contemporary art. But these were only gestures toward a breadth of necessary future toils. Muñoz invited us to join him in the spaces he wrote about; to actually perform queer futurity in those essential subaltern spaces, like the back room of that East Village bar, instead of merely staging performances in preparation for it. Take Ecstasy With Me is such a sad title. Like Muñoz’s legacy, it is a plea for communion that hangs in mid-air. It is a call still waiting to be answered.

Take Ecstasy With Me occurred on April 17, 2014 as part of The Whitney Museum of Art 2014 Biennial.