The issue explores the complexities of the ‘personality disorder’ with new perspectives on “identity, the virtual, transcendence and how our aesthetic embodiment relates to capitalism.” Looking at the ways our “psychic/social ecology meets with the environmental in haemorrhage of inner to outer”, the focus relates to the overarching aim of the zine which is rooted in “ecology’s muddled identity.”
Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings are presenting installation How to Survive a Flood@GAYBAR at London’s David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF), opening May 13 and running to May 28.
As part of the Curators’ Series’ Ways of Livingprogramme running to June 23, the London-based artist-duo will transform the DRAF Studio into a working bar featuring new video, audio, and light boxes that explore the history of New York gay resort Fire Island in relation to its present state of rapid gentrification and natural disaster.
The project aims to cite and critique the complicated identity of said LGBTQ community and its relationship with private property and privilege by reimagining it as a “queer, sci-fi and anarchic space” with works weaving CGI landscapes, found footage of post-Hurricane Sandy destruction and an audio piece produced by Jan Piasecki weaving together pop music and the sounds of ecological destruction.
How To Survive a Flood is a continuation of Quinlan and Hastings’ ongoing @gaybar project, where “queer politics and history are remade in the context of a gay bar”. The programme will open with a cocktail party and bar-performance, as well as DJ sets by Nkisi (aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo) and Summer Faggot Deathwish (aka Sam Cottington).
There will also be another accompanying event featuring Paul Maheke on May 21.
Arcadia Missa is curating the Ways of Living groupexhibition at London’s David Robert Arts Foundation (DRAF), opening April 14 and running to July 23.
Presented as the ninth edition of the Curators’ Series, the self-organised space will present works by 16 artists —emergent and historical —who “occupy and transform spaces”. Those artists whose practices aim to politicise the places that locate them include Hannah Black, Sharon Hayes, Holly White, Peter Hujar and Jesse Darling among others.
The event, that seeks work that functions in a way that is “inverse to the individualised, satellite modes in which we are increasingly expected to work” will open with a new performance by Beatrice Loft Schulz and DJ sets from Juliana Huxtable and Goth Tech.
The Garden group show will be on at Paris’ ROOM E-10 27, opening February 11 and running to February 24.
Thirteen artists will show work in ROOM E-10 27’s garden. The pieces will contribute to the environment, finding moments between the domesticity of nature and the ability to overcome and menace it, according to the press release, which also tells a tender story about Derek Jarman’s meditative and arid garden:
“Poking out of the flint surface, its irises, plants and rusty crosses made from wrenches, is a far cry from the green monochrome of Bree Van de Kampf’s perfectly tended lawns that adorn Wisteria Lane.”
@Gaybar continues its activist party streak with a new event called Wet Protest at Penarth Centre in London tonight, August 28.
Created by artists Hannah Quinlan Anderson and Rosie Hastings, the party series has always combined LGBTQ activism with sweaty good times, and tonight’s no different. “The GAY LIBERATION FRONT became the GAY ACTIVIST ALLIANCE,” writes the event press release, which “became the Stonewall Movie but the G always stood for G-A-Y always stood for WHITE CIS GAY MAN and for transphobic lesbians who clock misogyny but not transmisogyny and racist radical queers”.
Arcadia Missa‘s How to Sleep Faster exhibition and book series launches its sixth edition, running at their London location from August 27 to August 29.
The ongoing publication and exhibition series published its first edition in 2011 and has featured some aqnb favourites throughout its five previous editions, including Jesse Darling, Paul Kneale, Huw Lemmeyand Ann Hirsch inissue #4.
For its sixth edition, How to Sleep Faster asks: “How can we fuck in a way that doesn’t support a patriarchal prism and standard for sex to reflect capitalist relations? Can sex be a site for identity politics, after we are imbued with the lore and failure of the sexual ‘revolution’?” Amongst the dozens of participating artists are Amalia Ulman, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Hannah Quinlan Anderson & Rosie Hastings, and Cristine Brache.
Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan Anderson team up again for their first solo Paris show, If These Fossils Could Talk They Would Tell You Who Got Fucked and Who Didn’t, opening at Room E-10 27on June 26.
The exhibition is the second instalment of a series of projects hosted by Room E-10 27, a curatorial platform run by Thomas Butler from his apartment in Paris. The two artists take over the art space with a response to Jose Muñoz’s writings on the evolution of queerness and its consequent political future, exploring the “radical potential of queer objects in a post-human and post-apocalyptic world” through a new video work.
Hastings and Anderson are perhaps best known for their popular @GAYBAR series of exhibitions and events, which work to re-materialize the gay bar as a politically queer space and a way to examine the “neo-liberalisation, white-washing and heteronormalization of gay rights”. Responding to the gentrification and erasure of alternative queer spaces in their native London, the two artists question both their erasure and their presence in If These Fossils Could Talk…, using sophisticated CGI rendering of imagined landscapes to reimagine a new symbolic order.
The two are putting together the programme alongside their recently launched Arcadia Missa show, based on their 2014 @Gaybar project and titled TIFKAS (running at the gallery from March 5 to April 4).
Inspired by Sarah Schulman‘s description of ‘ecocide’ in Gentrification of The Mind as “a certain urban ecology of queer sub-cultural existence that has been wiped out, both through AIDS and gentrification”, their March 10 event brings some of the same names as TIFKAS, as well as Schulman herself, together with Jim Hubbard, Sam Kenswil, and Claire Kurylowski as well as ten or so other artists.
The exhibition is envisioned as a re-materialisation of the idea of a gay bar as a politically queer space, an idea that stemmed from and with their joint 2014 project @Gaybar. Much like their project, the show envisages “a fantasy gay bar through reimagining queer iconography, history and writing that spans geological, political and temporal locations”.
The night will feature free-flowing tequila, special readings by Hannah Black, Aimee Heinemann and Jesse Darling, as well as a screening of Anderson and Hasting’s new film.
On Sunday, Where is the body-creators Hannah Quinlan Anderson and Rosie Hastings (Sonya Blade) take on Wang’s latest, Against Innocence, originally published in 2012 in Volume 1 of the materialist feminist journal, Lies. Where as some of Wang’s earlier writing, including zines like On Being Hard Femme and The Phallic Titty Manifesto, looked at queer sexuality and gender, Almost Innocence dives headfirst into race politics with her examination of the political response to the murder of Troy Davis and the role of legal system as an agent of racial violence.