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Queer(ing) Art, Curation and Collaboration, Oct 2023
- Opening Essay
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Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration
Authors: Chris Green and Dominic BiltonThis article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue of Art & the Public Sphere on the topics of Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration. The overall aim of this issue is to explore current trends in queer art, curatorial practice and forms of collaboration. The articles in this issue draw on international perspectives that provide the reader with global approaches to the topics in question. The following editorial is in three parts, the first explores a range of definitions or (un)definitions of queer and queering. Drawing on key theorists to provide context for their usage, we must preface that these definitions are by no means exhaustive but are illustrative of the type of writing available (although authors might also offer their own definition). The second part of the editorial explores a small selection of examples and approaches to queer art, curation and collaboration that we identify as significant. Again, this is not a full list of queer practice ongoing globally, but a small selection of case studies that act as examples that are pertinent to us. The final section of the editorial functions as a question and answer/interview between academic Dr Chris Green and project producer Dominic Bilton about Bilton’s recent curatorial project (Un)Defining Queer, an exhibition held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester throughout 2023.
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- Articles
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The uses of failure: Transnational collaborative curation through a queer lens
More LessThis article examines some of the challenges, possibilities and rewards of transnational collaborative curation through a queer lens by reflecting critically on my work within the UKRI-funded GlobalGRACE project. There, six teams comprising academics, artists, NGO staff and local participant communities used creative methods to explore how ‘cultures of equality’ can be created and sustained, locally and globally. Our contexts were varied, from trans and queer sex workers battling criminalization in Cape Town, to LGBTQ+ poets exploring identity in Manila, to women construction workers queering men’s work and worlds in Sylhet, Bangladesh. In addition to the themes addressed, we sought to queer the project by challenging the white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal structures that dominate conventional academic and artistic spheres in (and beyond) the Global North – including those we were ourselves situated within. My role was to lead the curation of exhibitions that captured our collective ethos and goals. Tracing the project over four years, I explore the challenges of working together across differences, and explain how our approach developed through disagreement, debate, negotiation and experimentation – processes that revealed layered power dynamics and political pluralities and oppositionalities. Reflecting on conflicting views about what ‘worked’ in our initial experimentations, I draw on Halberstam’s conceptualization of failure as queer art (2011) to suggest that apparent missteps in creative work can lead to productive encounters, necessary (re)evaluations and new platforms for subjugated knowledge. The conjoined crises of a global pandemic and severe funding cuts forced us to more fully confront the oppressive structures in which we worked, and to critically reconfigure the meaning and implications of ‘care’ within GlobalGRACE. I close by explaining how these experiences guided our collaborative curation of a final exhibition designed to indict oppressive structures while putting a multiplicity of queer perspectives into productive conversation.
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Notes for a tropicuir curatorship
More LessThe present article offers some critical reflections derived from a curatorial experience of a sexual and gender dissidence art exhibition called The Bodies Are the Artworks, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 2017 – within a decade of major queer insurgence on the streets of Brazil. On a journey that begins by locating my own cis-gay-White-man body – and its limitations – in the process, we look at activist curatorial practices as an agency to bring about queer arts and activism that configure micropolitical tools for the interconnected insurgency of dissident bodies. We look at strategies to guarantee a diversity of perspectives and practices and also equality concerning representation of bodies. The process of putting together the exhibition raised questions such as: What political issues should and could we address? How to deal with representativeness in the face of so many complex and intersectional issues? How do we decide which artists should be present – and therefore which should be excluded? Moves were made to collectivize the curatorial process in order to guarantee a multiplicity of transgressive aesthetic-political artworks and activations as counter-normative strategies.
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The queering of monuments: Hauntological remembrance in Vienna
Authors: Friederike Landau-Donnelly, Mareike Schwarz and Pablo Santacana LópezThis article examines entanglements between past, present and futures of queerness visible in monuments as materialized forms of memory. We distinguish between queer monuments (i.e. positioning, and potentially imposing reified representations of queer history or memory) and the queering of monuments (i.e. challenging heteronormative or otherwise reductionist historical discourses, practices or memorial cultures of remembrance). By reflecting on oscillations between institutionalization, recognition, commodification and counter-memorial practice, we suggest the queering of monuments as an unfinished conceptual trope that embraces the non-conclusiveness of the past and future. Queering monuments nuances underlying tensions about the meaning and aesthetics of queer-themed heritage sites, objects and subjects, which emerge from multi-stakeholder arrangements of monument-making. Our approach chimes with critical heritage and monument studies that emphasize performative, affective-emotional and ghostly dimensions of heritage. By pulling hauntology into queer memorial discourse, we discuss queerness as an embodied and epistemological appearance that can challenge presentist, monolithic and thus potentially exclusive understandings of both heritage and monuments. Through queer temporality we situate our reflections in the public monument ARCUS – Shadow of a Rainbow – Memorial for Homosexuals Persecuted during the Nazi Era in Vienna, Austria (2023). We unpack the conflictual constellations of past and present voices, materialities and memories around the sculpture, using the rainbow motif (which became a symbol for queer people in the 1970s) to remember the persecution of queers during the Nazi Era. The monument begs the question how Vienna seeks to brand itself as a ‘rainbow city’, while continuously displacing queer practices from urban public space. Queering, in sum, embraces ghosts of past and present complex histories, trauma and joy instead of squeezing them into smooth or unambiguous narratives. Queering monuments thus outline a conflict-attuned approach to queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration.
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Considering care as relational queer praxis
More LessIn this article, I analyse Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and some early critical responses, primarily from art historian Claire Bishop, from two perspectives: firstly, positing care as an alternative mode of assessment for relational work; and secondly, from the queer perspective, exploring the radical implications of the little-discussed queer roots of Bourriaud’s theory, the work of Cuban–American artist Félix González-Torres. From this analysis and a reflection on my personal experience of a relational artwork, I develop a theory of care as relational queer praxis and consider some of its possibilities for the design of contemporary art exhibitions and space.
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Cruising the archive: Discovering a queer methodology
By Steven PaigeAs an artist researcher I am exploring how I orientate my queer body in an archival space. The focus of this article is how my discursive body negotiates archival relations, conflating ‘cruising’ as a method, seeking through intrigue and desire, making connections and disruptions across archival accounts. I am building upon the current dialogues across ‘queering and queered’ archives and this understanding offers a recognition of the visceral relationship that forms when finding and meeting the charged archival items. In seeking through a ‘queer/ed’ approach to creative research, I am acknowledging the ‘distinct knowing of self’ that takes place, where an archive yields to me and me to it. In this case I am recognizing and acknowledging potential relations and partnerships with my own curiously, cruising gaze through the artefacts, be they clearly announced or in the gaps and slippages. This self-perpetuating path, as I seek one queer body after another, one encounter after another, is a possible alternative approach to the normative and historized methods of archival research. The locus of this research is centred through time spent in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archive, New York, in June 2023. My approach develops a form of community recognition and building, a renewed discovery of a queer/queered network of sympathies, where both the researcher and archive and the creative opportunities become more porous, affected and meaningful.
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- Creative Contributions
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The drag of the archive
By Elly ClarkeDragging the Archive: A Personal Re:encounter with Franklin Furnace’s Cyber Beginnings was an exhibition I curated in the Victorian Library at Pratt Institute in New York that showed a range of materials relating to the ‘cyber turn’ the organization took in the mid-1990s and the first few years of Franklin Furnace’s decade-long performance series of work presented online entitled The Future of the Present.1 Keen to highlight the labour involved with maintaining such an archive, my curatorial approach included weaving in my own personal diary entries from that time to provide a 22-year-old’s perspective of New York at that time; my own photographs of both the archive and the people involved in it; a video I made of never before shown slides of the first two years of the Netcasts,2 and e-mails revealing the pushback founding director Martha Wilson and her team encountered in this decision to move from being a physical arts organization with a space3 in downtown Tribeca, to an online organization. A fax from Laurie Anderson expresses dismay at this new mode of presenting work, whilst negotiations with Pseudo Studios revealed how much money was being charged for this pixilated vision of the present moving into the future. This article is a poetic reflection on the personal approach I took to putting this show together a year on, incorporating where I am (was) now (then) as I wrote/write, not very well with lingering COVID-19, feeling myself to be archived, as the digital version of the show lives on. My own labour (for the time being) exhausted.
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Scratchy script
Authors: Fritha Jenkins and Louise AshcroftWe, Louise Ashcroft and Fritha Jenkins, are writing this article together, oscillating queerly, changing its mind as it goes and talking itself into and out of forms, to reflect the way we work together. We have run frequent performance art scratch nights for more than ten years. These events are fast, creatively risky, chaotic and experimental, but the expertise from years of performing together and separately give the whole thing a rhythm that feels disciplined and formally cohesive in its own way. Louise has ADHD and Fritha is Autistic. We are both queer. We both have unique strengths and weaknesses (and queer ND pride and shame) which has led us to nurture a way of supporting one another. The scratch nights are a defiant space, unfunded and anarchically unconventional. Here we take a moment to reflect, in true Unperforming style, on our creative collaborative methodologies.
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- Book Reviews
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The Lure of the Social: Encounters with Contemporary Artists, Gretchen Coombs (2021)
By Fiona WhelanReview of: The Lure of the Social: Encounters with Contemporary Artists, Gretchen Coombs (2021)
Bristol: Intellect, 200 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78938-322-5, p/bk, GBP 34.00
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Barbara Holub: Silent Activism/Stiller Aktivismus, Başak Şenova (ed.) and Barbara Holub (2022)
More LessReview of: Barbara Holub: Silent Activism/Stiller Aktivismus, Başak Şenova (ed.) and Barbara Holub (2022)
Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 312 pp.,
ISBN 978-3-11079-081-8, h/bk, GBP 45.50
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