'Desire has no history’ is a quote by iconic thinker Susan Sontag. The American writer and philosopher uses this quote to refer to the exlusive, timeless nature of desire, which cannot be pinned down to a specific time or place. In the exhibition Desire has no history, Studio Paul & Haiko explores the tension between desire, identity and history. 

Performer and artist Paul van de Waterlaat and designer and curator Haiko Sleumer have been working together for several years, focusing on repairing and queering both personal and collective history. Unfulfilled desires from their own childhood and stereotyping around queer identity are the starting point in their work. In the exhibition Desire has no history, the duo shows how stigmas from the past cast their shadows over the present. Common clichés and archetypes faced by queers today stem from the way past medical science spoke about them - often in terms of abnormal, unnatural and disease.  

In a world where expectations and prejudices limit or deny queers' dreams and desires, Studio Paul & Haiko literally puts the scissors to taboos and negative image-making. What was once fixed is cut open and old rules are revised. By making androgynous children's clothes for Paul's younger self and a quilt made from his mother's dresses, on the one hand Paul's personal history is repaired and rewritten. On the other hand, nineteenth-century stigmas surrounding homosexuality - extreme virility and physical characteristics such as long thin hands, enlarged penises and fussy behavior - are magnified in collages of imaginative queer monsters.