Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Related to Edie Fake’s Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — Personal Business draws an association between architecture and the body, with ornamental structures that are decorative and protective. Fake notes, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.” A beautiful building that’s defended by an imposing front. In this way, the architecture becomes a metaphor for the constructed layers of the self.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The performance title A Gente Combinamos De Não Morrer (BANDEIRA #1) / Us Agreed Not To Die (FLAG #1) is taken from a short story by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, whose work addresses violence, resilience, and necropolitics with an Afro-diasporic lens. This artwork by Jota Mombaça articulates connections between black and trans people’s challenges and struggles. Mombaça points out that an ongoing genocide of these minorities underscores the established power structures, and their resistance is to survive.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Glorie #7 by Caspar Heinemann is made from cardboard boxes in which the artist received deliveries at home during lockdown, as well as other materials that he uses in an improvisatory way. Initially, Heinemann began this project by wanting to make a series of birdhouses, an interest of his that derived from walking in parks during lockdown, when bird life was so much more present as a result of the reduction in traffic noise and the absence of aircrafts. Though birdhouses may be safe spaces to nurture fledglings, they are also inherently absurd, as human constructs projected onto bird life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Highly autobiographical, exquisitely made and compiling different aspects of the artist’s practice, Kiss of the Rabbit God is one of Andrew Thomas Huang’s most precise, relevant, and successful videos. This video work exemplifies a new, global wave of queering tradition, indigenous references and international pop/post-internet esthetics. In this short video, a Chinese-American restaurant worker falls in love with an 18th century Qing dynasty god of gay lovers who visits him at night and leads him on a journey of sexual awakening and self discovery.

Mr. Black, Mr. Navy, Mr. Stripes is a photographic series of opera gloves made of men’s tailored trousers that were presented in 2017 in “La Plage” in Paris, a shop window turned into an experimental art space. The personification of the objects named after characters intended to compose a fiction from the display. The project follows Zhu’s thinking on the definition of “queer”: how to express a state?

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which he changes the rules of the game and all imitations are suddenly interrupted – Third episode of The Unmanned series and replicating the editing structure of “1834 – La Mémoire de Masse”, “The Outlawed” takes place in August 1953 on the island of Corfu, in Greece, at the Club Méditerranée resort where Alan Turing spent his last summer. On a sunny afternoon, the mathematician and inventor of the modern computer, subjected to hormonal treatment after being convicted for his homosexuality, embarks on a makeshift raft to study the morphogenesis of marine organisms. As he explores the coast, the raft progressively drifts away.

Photography (Photography)

In Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018) Marcel Pardo Ariza draws on Bay Area queer histories that have been uncovered from local archives and queer organizations, and connects them to people currently living in the Bay, where Ariza is also based. This particular portrait features a skein of arms and legs, in both color and black and white print, intimately woven together. Tender and sensual, the tangle of limbs incorporates both stereotypically feminine and masculine traits in various skin tones.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly.

Installation (Installation)

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo. The installation features a series of small square vitrines, inset, dark and precisely spot-lit. Inside these are framed photographs, mostly black and white, of young Asian men, taken, as the titles on the neat brass name plates tell us, in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Photography (Photography)

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated. Shot from directly above, they are lavish views of very private spaces. The artist plays to her viewers’ voyeuristic impulses, inviting us to look, but then denying us the opportunity to study the figures to whom the sheets belong, so that the rumpled covers become like anthropomorphic stand-ins inviting empathic projection.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes. It is written and directed by artist Nao Bustamante and its cast includes notable Los Angeles-based artists Gabriela Ruiz, rafa esparza, San Cha, Markus Kuiland-Nazario, Ron Athey, and Dorian Wood. The work also features a musical and sound score by Nick Hallett and costumes by OLIMA.

Photography (Photography)

Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender. The very practice of being photographed raises many complex issues around gender performance and the relationships between an inner self and an outer public persona. Even though Mike and Sky are cropped and obscure one another, many of their choices for self-presentation—as emphasized by their tattoos—remain visible.

Photography (Photography)

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly.

Photography (Photography)

Angela (crotch grab)