When a pawn in a chess match reaches the eighth square on the far side of the board, the player can swap him for a piece of his or her choice. So the pawn can transform into a queen, a powerless figure into the epitome of power, a man into a woman.
Sexuality does not end in family politics or a TV series. Sexuality is always a quaking and transmuting, is desire and power, seduction and sadness, splendor and misery. Looking beyond vaudeville or pornography, only art enables the subject to be discovered in all its fascination and specificity. It not only permits a game with the sexes and with forbidden desires that is free of danger, but is alone able to grasp all of sexuality’s inherent contradictions. What does that mean for divergent desires? What does that mean after our present liberalization, in a world standardized to death? What is this world like for feminine men, for masculine women?
The Eighth Square casts a new and sharp eye on art, it sounds out the historical and social developments. This is the publication in which drag and gender, queerness and transsexuality are presented on a broad platform, in all of its facets, and above all where it is allowed to be erotic.
 

Artists featured (selection):
Diane Arbus, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Gober, David Hockney, Peter Hujar, Ferdinand Kriwet, Zoe Leonard, Robert Mapplethorpe, Michaela Melián, Annette Messager, Piotr Nathan, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Paul Thek, Wolfgang Tillmans
Exhibition schedule: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, August 19–November 12, 2006