JULIANA HUXTABLE Untitled (Lil’ Marvel) 2015
This Pride month, and in a moment in which conservative bigotry and both misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic vitriol and attacks have been rife, it feels crucial for London to be hosting a large-scale exhibition focused on challenging gender perceptions. Kiss My Genders, a major new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at London’s Southbank Centre, hosts thirty international artists and over 100 works, celebrating a wide spectrum of gender fluidity, non-binary, trans, and intersex identities, spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, and photography. Rather than relying on theory or academic concepts, the show argues in favour of a joyful and playful approach. Speaking to the curator Vincent Honoré, he explains, “Gender is something that you live, not something that you read. It’s on the dancefloor, in fashion, everywhere.”
“The material comes from the artists themselves,” Honoré continues, pointing to the subjective nature of the exhibition. “It is their lives, their emotions, their art.” This emphasis on empathy and conversation as one of the exhibition’s strategies is also echoed by the roundtable discussion in the accompanying catalogue, published in lieu of a formal introduction. The performance artist, poet, and writer Travis Alabanza notes how they found the Hayward exhibition a welcome shift, “I was just so done with these stale conversations about gender; [other institutions] would bring in these really exciting artists, but make their work seem more mundane or serious. That’s what’s been left out over these last two years – the playfulness that I and so many other trans, queer, gender non-binary artists have.” For Ajamu, a photographer and activist whose practice has often invoked pornography as an artistic mode to reclaim agency and pleasure, “that playfulness or that mischievousness is no less political; although it is not seen as political, because people assume it’s not doing that sociocultural work.”
Akin to a nightclub, the viewer is able to cruise across the gallery. There are no dead ends. This evocation of a domestic or subterranean space is enhanced by the design, which makes use of black and pink latex wall hangings, chiffon and satin curtains, mirrors, and repurposed palette crates. “The exhibition is not addressed to the masses,” Honoré says, “when you enter, you can turn right, left, or go upstairs. It creates territories and areas of discoveries.” Artworks also appear on the staircases, cover the outside of the building (notably American drag performer Joan Jett Blakk’s 1992 presidential campaign poster representing the ‘Queer Nation Party’, which is fly-posted across the exterior walls), and installations from Athi-Patra Ruga and Ad Minoliti are situated off-site within the Southbank Centre. Intergenerational connections and conversations are also crucial to the politics of the show. In addition to showing contemporary artists like Victoria Sin, Juliana Huxtable, and Flo Brooks, Honoré was keen to include artists like Pierre Molinier, Luciano Castelli, Peter Hujar, and Jimmy DeSana. “Not to create a history but on the contrary to break that lineage,” he explains, “but to show that the important concerns embraced by artists in the 1960s and 70s—feminism, gay rights, and unconventional conceptions of masculinity—paved the way for changes in how gender was socially perceived and is considered today.” The disruption of chronology filters into the experience of the show as a spectator, addressed to the individual rather than the group.
Questions surrounding community, club culture, and queer spaces are embedded in the show. In her photographs from the 1990s, Catherie Opie subverted the tradition of Renaissance portraiture when representing members of the gay, lesbian, and sadomasochistic communities she was part of in San Francisco. During a similar period in London, artist Del LaGrace Volcano was involved in the formation of the city’s first lesbian sex and performance club, Chain Reaction, in addition to being part of the emerging drag king scene. It’s a “visual road map of euphoric, turn of the century queer London” they write. Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’ film Something for the Boys (2018) relates to this concept of a queer road map, but the tone is melancholic as opposed to euphoric. Filmed in Blackpool, at the cabaret club Funny Girls and men-only gay sex bar Growlr, their exploration offers a painful and elegiac enquiry into the future of LGBQT+ spaces, which are closing in great numbers across the country due to conservative austerity and the loss of public space. Their installation is one of other more directly political works, such as Hunter Reynolds Memorial Dress (1993), printed with the names of 25,000 individuals who died from AIDS-related illnesses, and Zanele Muholi’s series Crime Scene (2012), an evocation of the violence suffered by the lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa.
As the transgender, Latinx artist Martine Gutierrez writes, “we’re living in an era where my existence is political whether I want to be or not.” Her 2018 photographic series Masking and Demons explores identity as “alien and unfamiliar”, assuming the guise of multiple deities as a way of examining cultural representation, in addition to exploring the modes in which the West have perpetuated certain stereotypes or clichéd iconographies. The monstrous, fantasy characters in Jenkin van Zyl’s psychedelic horror film installation Looners (2019)—a major new commission from the Hayward—obliquely and physically revel in the destruction of stable identity and bodily categories. As the cinematic narrative unfolds, their hedonism and pleasure signifies the level of ecstasy that an abandonment of control might offer.
If there is one key message to be taken from Kiss My Genders, it is the right for the body to be subversive, mischievous, ambiguous, even illegible, demonstrating that an expansive and fluid approach is both political and truly liberating.
Kiss My Genders runs through to 8 September 2019 at the Hayward Gallery, London.