Art & the Public Sphere - Queer(ing) Art, Curation and Collaboration, Oct 2023

The 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.

This 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.

In 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.

As 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.

We, 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.

Review 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