The Kind of Flossy group exhibition is on at London’s Assembly Point, opening November 3 and running to December 10.
Curated by C.R.E.A.M., the show features work by London-based artists Evan Ifekoya, Adam Saad, and Zadie Xa,and looks at the use of visibility as a mode of resistance. Exploring the space of both spectacle as well as refusal, the exhibition “seeks to meditate upon questions of lived politics in the context of exploitation, appropriation and erasure within visual culture.”
C.R.E.A.M. is a curatorial initiative organised by Taylor Le Melle and Imran Perrettabringing artists, writers and community organizers together to problematize tokenism and explore possibilities beyond the institution.
The Dream Babes intersectional queer experience programme is on at London’s Auto Italia, opening September 7 and running to September 9.
The long-term project, made in collaboration with Victoria Sinfeatures artists using speculative fiction as a productive medium and is comprised of many iterations, public moments, and opportunities to come together. The press release states, “in the face of representational violence, speculative fiction is a productive medium to invade existing narratives that naturalize normative states of sex, gender and race, imaging futurity that does not depend on existing historical and social infrastructure”.
On September 7, the programme begins with ‘Resis’dance DJ Workshop’. It aims to give an opportunity for female, trans, and non-binary people to learn the basics of DJing in a welcoming, non judgemental environment. Cassandre Greenberg and Christopher Kirubi form the duo Special Tears and will perform live and present ‘CRY BABY: Get Close’, some notes on desperation and closeness. Their presentation and performance follows with DJ sets from Ann Ayoola, Oretha, cruise_control and Manara.
September 8 begins with Evan Ifekoya and Victoria Sin, who invite attendees to “partake in a moment of queer collectivity focusing on experiences of nightlife and the physical within the social body”. Chooc Ly Tan’s Spacer Woman will DJ after, presenting a varied selection influenced by Hip Hop, Afrobeat, Bollywood, experimental Dakbe, and high-voltage Electro.
Delany Fanclub opens on September 9, an informal afternoon screening group, looking at the work of science fiction writer and essayist Samuel Delany. Followed by ‘Lipstix and Lipsynx Performative Workshop’ with Adam Saad and Raju Rage. The workshop intends to uncover secret present selves and open up queer portals of self-affirmation for “moments of future whateva”. The programme closes with a DJ set from Sydney UltraOmni.
The exhibition announcement comes accompanied by a title insinuating an unequal give-and-take arrangement, partly inspired by Britney’s Spears single Gimme More, released on the US pop star’s infamous 2007 Blackout album, and an excerpt of the lyrics credited to its songwriters Danja, Jim Beanz, Keri Hilson and Marcella Araica.
In their ongoing interest in “discovering new lexica for queer in contemporary art and media” Binghao Wong –writer and curator of Arcadia Missa‘s Asymmetric Grief exhibition, that ran July 17 to 25 –focusses in on the work of London based artist and composer Adam Saad:
“it would seem that my doctor thinks of pain as an exception
what a privilege it is to navigate the world like that
as if pain is something you can pinpoint and eliminate
not the only thing that reminds you that you have a body
to begin with.
…
we are not broken
we are working the way we were told to
do you understand?”
– stanzas from ‘the bible belt’ courtesy Alok Vaid-Menon.
Adam Saad, ‘Cruis(IN) Portal (Dreamlover) I & II’ (2015) Install view. Courtesy Arcadia Missa, London.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw made the incisive observation that women of colour are often rejected from both of their identitarian camps, leaving them legislatively and socially vulnerable. Indebted to like-minded formulations of the unique pains of intersectionality, Asymmetric Grief was borne of an agential desire to manifest the complexities of intersectional queer subjects. Further, as queerness has now become synonymous with a certain degree of cultural currency or capital, the project grapples with the contingencies and pitfalls of our heightened visibility. In the fields of contemporary art and media, how then can we represent the realities of injustice and agony that have been equivocally leveled against us? At its core, Asymmetric Grief foregrounds enduring self-portraits of what queerness really looks like in an era dominated by pinkwashed, white homonormativity.
As diasporic queers of colour, the edification of a small minority of white, Euro-American gay men and women proves that LGBTQ+ ecologies are not homeostatic. Rather, we teeter on unbalanced scales. While prim and proper white gay bodies are elevated in their conservative quests for marriage equality and familial security, global brown bodies are demonized and debased as homophobic terrorists. What goes up must come down. Among communities of colour, yellow Asian bodies are infantilized and hence lauded as model minorities because of our silent complicity, while brown and black bodies continue to be openly incarcerated and murdered.
Bhenji Ra + Justin Shoulder, ‘Deep Alamat’ (2014) Install view. Commissioned by Artbank, Sydney. Courtesy Arcadia Missa, London.
We celebrate our newfound pink power, but at what cost? When pride parades co-opt spectacle in the (dis)service of financialized queerness, it becomes apparent that we are no longer the ones who benefit from publicity. Riding the torpid white-wave of inclusion, recent repeals of laws prohibiting queer and trans subjects from serving in militaries go directly against the foundations of queer activism. By supplementing the very powers that police and persecute us, from the streets (in)to detention centers, queers of colour are ironically further denigrated in our supposed social uprising.
Our lives resemble arithmetic. However, when coordinating queerness, we end up with equations that are never balanced or correct. There isn’t a clear divide between right and wrong, because the answers we seek are as convoluted as the problems we face. For intersectional queer subjects, universality and resolution are unfathomable calculations.
Instead of imaging unquestioned success and progress, I observe that intersectional queer artists often employ what Jack Halberstam calls “technotopic” representations in order to picture the dissonant particularities of their multivalent narratives. Contradiction, rather than comprehension, is the objective. London-based artist Adam Saad renders drawings that weaponize representation in this way, allowing it to speak obliquely for the incongruences of queer realities.
An abstract practice of formalism thus takes precedence over didactic politics. In ‘Cruis[IN] Portal (Dreamlover) I & II’ (2015), Saad uses erasable markers to draw on the equally perishable and transient material of latex, strategically enacting dual deaths. Tangentially, he envisions ‘*Oral* Resurrection (My All)’ (2015) as an installation comprising a digitally enlarged drawing on waterproof fabric which is then intentionally exposed to water. These self-thwarting technologies of representation manifest the political unknowability of queer intersectionality. It is precisely these erratic, unresolved formal tensions that concretize the debilitating structural inequalities leveled against intersectional queer subjects. **
