Anne Imhof’s Wish you were gay was created as a billboard installation in public space and highlights the tensions between desire, projection, and social norms. Referencing a pop song, the title plays with expectations and attributions surrounding queer identities. The work makes clear how identity and sexuality become vulnerable in the public sphere. Through repeated acts of vandalism, the installation on the billboards of Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, became an involuntary part of a discourse on intolerance and the fragility of artistic interventions in urban spaces.

The installation view shown here documents one of the damaged billboards — traces of destruction have become part of the work itself, bearing witness to the tensions the piece provoked within society.