Amelia Abraham speaks to five LGBTQIA+ artists showing at Frieze London and “off-Frieze”.

WORDS AND CURATION BY AMELIA ABRAHAM
IMAGES (EXCEPT TAREK LAKHRISSI) BY LYDIA GARNETT
IMAGES OF TAREK LAKHRISSI BY CARTER HOWE

This week, the international art world spotlight turns onto London, as the Frieze Art Fair descends on the capital. The fair – the UK’s biggest, now in its 21st year – promises visitors the opportunity to encounter the work of queer former Turner Prize winners like painter and cultural activist Lubaina Himid, conceptual artist Jesse Darling, and canonical queer photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ work. Plus, that of underground-inspired artists like Dean Sameshima, whose screenprints draw on references to queer history and whose photographs capture queer underground spaces like porn theatres and bathhouses, or Jenkin van Zyl, whose experimental, bizarro and almost hallucinogenic films are playfully gory, fetishistic and grotesque. 

There’s a “but”: Frieze can feel exclusive – those in the art world or adjacent may snag a free pass, tickets purchasable online come with a substantial price tag, and this is before we speak of the private networking events and parties. However, there is also plenty to see during Frieze at no cost and your own convenience; weather allowing, take a walk through Regent’s Park to see the annual Frieze Sculpture exhibition – a free and public display – of or visit concurrent shows at surrounding galleries (more on that below). A collaboration between gallery Gordon Robichaux and Tate has also led to Frieze Library, a collection of books that inspired the artists on show this year. 

Whether attending the fair itself or looking for “off-Frieze” exhibitions to see, below is a list of five of the standout queer artists to know or get to know in 2024. They represent the next generation of artists reflecting experiences of state violence, diasporic identity, embodiment, joy and desire.

Eva Gold

Showing with upcoming East London-based gallery Rose Easton at this year’s Frieze, Eva Gold is a sculptor and multidisciplinary artist from Manchester and based in London. Her work deals with subtle themes like agency, ambiguity and coercion. There’s often the sense of latent threat, which can feel disconcerting. “My work asks questions like; who is in control of a situation, and how might that power shift hands in subtle ways throughout an exchange or transaction?” explains Gold of how her queerness informs her practice. “Or else examining positions that might undermine or challenge initial preconceptions.”

Take her previous show The Last Cowboys, which drew from the memories of being in nightclubs and male-only sex clubs in Berlin. In a tiled cubicle, rubber coats appear ghoulish on hooks, fluorescent sign “open late” hints at hedonism. Gold worked on this series from 2020 – 2022, when nightclubs and other public spaces were closed and there was a heightened feeling of anxiety around bodies and contagion. The title The Last Cowboys comes from a passage in the book Close to the Knives, by David Wojnarowicz, in which he is describing the Hudson Piers, sites of anonymous sex overshadowed by the fear and impending horror of AIDS. 

“I’m interested in voyeurism – a kind of pleasure from watching or consuming, and the implicit violence of that” 

At Frieze, Gold will show an installation that brings drawings together with a new text work. “There are quite a lot of layers, but I would say the show as a whole is dealing with the subject of memory. My ongoing interest in the resonance of cinematic imagery and the collective unconscious comes into contact with a more focussed written narrative, which engages with the ways in which we work through the past, reflecting on the fallibility and malleability of memory. When making this show I was interested in the question of how we build our own versions of the truth, when memories of past events can be continually reshaped in the present.”

For Gold, cinema is often a starting point, the artist drawn to its manipulative abilities. “As an art form, it’s so good at controlling the emotions of an audience. I’m exploring how to try to carry some of that over – to look at the mechanisms it uses, to think about how that might be reconfigured into different materials and approaches, or to create certain kinds of tension.” You might notice references to David Lynch and Michael Haneke. “I’m interested in voyeurism – a kind of pleasure from watching or consuming, and the implicit violence of that.” 

Tarek Lakhrissi

Running throughout October at NiCOLETTi Gallery in Shoreditch is French-Moroccan artist Tarek Lakhrissi’s latest show, SPIT. The work takes as its starting point an incident at Paris Pride in June 2024 when the artist was spat on and verbally attacked for carrying Palestinian and Algerian flags. The physical act of ejecting liquid from one’s mouth, and the possible erotic or aggressive dimensions of this act inform an exploration of tensions between violence and desire and between subversion and resistance. “It’s an act of disgust, but also important in queer sexual lives,” says Lakhrissi, who explains that the incident led him to think about transitions, how as queer people we move from spaces of un-safety to safety and back again, a process that can be disorienting.  

In the show, glass sculptures representing suns are adorned with door knockers, presiding over the show like talismans – protective objects but also portal-like. Two monstrous green tongues, also sculpted from glass, attempt to connect with one another. “I love to work on topics of monstrosity, how queer people have been treated this way throughout history, but reclaim that through playfulness.” Cut to the largest sculpture in the show, a huge and kinky devilish head emerging from the floor. Some might notice it resembles, perhaps surprisingly, the Pokemon Gengar and, in Lakhrissi’s words, the devil emoji you send to your partner when you’re horny. 

“Unless you’re a white bourgeois person, it can feel like you don’t have access to the art world”

As well as playing on mythology and queer semantics, Lakhrissi is interested in combining literary references and thought drawn from queer theory with nods to pop culture. “This monster is almost laughing at the visitors coming in – it’s a comment on the access of art spaces, my take on classism, racism and elitism in the art world because I’m coming from a working-class background where art was not part of everyday life in my family and with my childhood friends. Unless you’re a white bourgeois person, it can feel like you don’t have access.”

While his work has often been inspired by literature and theory, now those references are fewer and further in between. “Pop culture brought me to theory, that brought me to literature, which brought me to queer studies, and now I’m back to pop culture. I want my art to be more accessible, and use pop culture references to connect more with people.” Still, as well as an artist, Lakhrissi is a poet. Text figures in his work as both an influence (the lesbian writer Monique Wittig’s writings have been a large inspiration) as well as an expression of his thought processes. If you can’t catch the show in London, look out for his poetry work, which often – like his visual work – deals with speculative narratives of transformation. 

Divine Southgate-Smith

Alongside a current duo show at Public Gallery in London (also called SPIT), at this year’s Frieze, Divine Southgate-Smith – born in Togo, West Africa – is showing a booth installation named Aspects of Things Existing. The installation is inspired by the materiality of glass, which Southgate-Smith has been researching for over a year. “I’ve been looking at the history of glass on the African continent. I’m interested in the material’s proximity to visions of the future, modernity, innovation and how this intersects with indigenous technologies.”

The show at Frieze meditates on how one material object, a glass bead, can be re-excavated and re-appropriated to nod to a futuristic understanding of Afrikanity. “Growing up I understood that a singular bead had no meaning, it is the configuration of beads that allows us to communicate a code that reveals our social standing or spiritual understanding. This is the energy with which this installation is made –  each artwork a vessel that allows the possibility to delve into a way of seeing – a collapsing and fusing of past, present and future.”

“I’m constantly discovering, and the joy and satisfaction that I get from that affirms my curiosity”

Aspects of Things Existing fits into their wider research-based practice which often explores African craft and design, whereby they respond to objects within museum collections, where context, function and even spiritualism are too often erased. As an object maker and artist who creates work in the digital plane, looking at the history of a material is important to them. At Frieze, for instance, they are showing the leaning glass sculpture Twerk. “That piece is about the shadows of something real. I’m really questioning how we record our experiences throughout history and am fascinated by the contrast between the capturing of bodies through image and the abstraction we see present in African sculptures. So you have a reflection that captures and situates you in your environment like Caravaggio’s Narcissus but – similar to the surface of the water he is depicting – you are able to fall into the image. This slippage offers a range of possibilities. It’s up to the viewer to imagine those possibilities.”

Talking of possibilities, their work is driven by curiosity. “What keeps me coming back to my practice is that I know deep down that there is always another way, I’m constantly discovering  and the joy and satisfaction that I get from that affirms my curiosity.” 

Wynnie Mynerva

An artist from a deeply religious Catholic family in Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru, Wynnie Mynerva says their childhood and place of origin have undoubtedly influenced both their outlook and their art practice. “It is a district that has emerged from migration: many people from the mountains of Peru fled to the capital in the 90s and based on self-management and their struggle they built an entire district. I grew up in a desert, I had a cradle that was a hole in the ground where my mother took care of me. I grew up where absolutely nothing existed, without a water system, without electricity, without a concrete roof, without protection and I learned how everything was built. It is a magical and mythical setting where my interest in social transformation stems from.” 

They’ve come to view Christianity as an apparatus of colonial control and challenge this through their radical works. They have painted friends having sex in their studio, and sewed their vagina shut as part of a performance piece. At their recent solo show at New York’s New Museum, alongside a breathtaking 70-foot painted mural, they displayed one of their ribs, which they had removed, in the piece The First Cut. 

“For me, art makes sense when it has a high dose of reality and has a transformative purpose”

The work they will show during Frieze, My Weaponized Body, considers their queer and chronically ill body as a weapon that can be used to attack or defend. “The exhibition opens the doors of my body, I present my skin, its organs and fluids. In my paintings, bodies appear open, revealing what is inside. These paintings go through different stages: guilt, prejudice, desire and transmutation. These canvases, treated with a layer of transparent gesso, generate a ‘naked canvas’ effect, whereby the oil is absorbed much more by the canvas and that makes the process more challenging.” they explain. “There is also a sculpture in the form of bones transforming and piercing through both floors of the gallery. The technique used is oil on canvases suspended in asymmetrical configurations. My intention was to expose myself to errors and to get rid of the artistic tools I know to move in uncertainty.” 

They think of their works – often towering paintings – as manifestos, declarations about life. 

“Many of these paintings are testimonial, although I try to address much broader themes than a personal experience or emotion. Art infiltrates life. For me, art makes sense when it has a high dose of reality and has a transformative purpose.” 

Rene Matić

Find Rene Matić’s work at multiple locations across this year’s Frieze. One is the booth of Arcadia Missa, one of London’s most exciting contemporary commercial galleries. Here, in a  large light box, is the photograph Campbell at Vogue Fabrics, 2024 – an image that represents Matić’s ongoing cataloging of their queer and specifically QTPOC community. Like the series Flags For Countries That Don’t Exist But Bodies That Do (also a published book) as well as their display in Tate Britain’s permanent collection, the work is concerned with, in the artist’s own words, “survival, care, love, subculture, and friendship” – particularly within the context of a political, social and economic British landscape that challenges the existence of these lifelines. 

“All of the work I’m working on at the moment is about multiple realities and worlds that live alongside another that overlap and intersect and contradict – I’m interested in the noise of it all, how overwhelming it is, how emotional, and taxing it is – but trying to find beauty in the moments where harmony can be found.” 

“All of the work I’m working on at the moment is about multiple realities and worlds that live alongside another that overlap and intersect and contradict”

Following in the footsteps of artists like Dame Tracey Emin and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Matić has been selected as the British artist to be spotlighted by Frieze sponsor Deutsche Bank at this year’s fair. The work on show, How Do You Like Your Love?, is a cross-medium presentation featuring wallpaper, lightbox installations, text-based sculptures and the artist’s own personal archive of records (reference to music is a large part of their practice, particularly Northern Soul, 2-tone and punk). A sculpture of a disco ball presides over the installation, refracting the images in its midst.

They reference a quote from James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country: “High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it.” The disco ball is also a motif the artist has returned to throughout their work as a signal of safety for Black QTPOC bodies. 

Frieze runs from 9 Oct to 13 Oct 2024. Buy tickets here.

Frieze Sculpture runs until 27 Oct 2024 and is free.

The post Spit, desire and identity: Meet the standout queer artists at this year’s Frieze appeared first on GAY TIMES.

WORDS BY AMELIA ABRAHAM
HEADER BY YOSEF PHELAN

Once upon a time – around 50 years ago – the word “gay” included a lot more than men who are attracted to men, or women who are attracted to women. It was a word used by trans women and femmes to self-describe, a word that brought cis gays and trans people together under one umbrella.

Take Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two of the key figures of the early gay liberation movement to come out of New York City in the late 1960s and early 70s, who used “gay” synonymously “drag queen” and “street queen” when talking about their own identities. Each Pride month, they are championed as trans heroines, demonstrating how “transgender” is a term we apply retrospectively, as a means to understand identities that feel difficult to name. This presents a tricky dilemma: sometimes it makes trans lives more visible, but sometimes it erases the truth of who an individual was, or how they understood themselves.

"I want to talk about how the mistreatment of one group is kind of a collective problem” - Jules Gill-Peterson.

This process of “tranfeminising” people was part of how the modern concept of transgender was created, explains historian Jules Gill-Peterson in her new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny. She begins with the history of “gendercide” – a term that describes how colonial systems forced colonised peoples into binary male or female categories.

She explains how, in 19th-century British-ruled India, for example, “third gender” Hijras – perceived as male-bodied people wearing women’s clothing – were stripped of their freedom and forcibly placed in men’s clothes. Hijras were viewed as a threat to the moral order of Western society at the time and punished for it, despite the face that they weren’t necessarily transgender.

 

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While many of us might have heard about the colonial erasure of those who lived beyond gender as we understand it today, Gill-Peterson’s book traces this gender policing from its inception as a colonial project to one put into practice by literal police forces and written into law in the 19th century. From there, she says, we start to see individual men and women entrained to see trans femininity as a threat to be put down with violence.

This is why, today, one of the most common forms of violence towards trans people occurs in settings where men are intimate with trans feminine people. It’s why some feminists think they have a right to an opinion over other people’s gender identity. “I don’t think this is a predetermined feature of human psychology,” says Gill-Peterson. “Men are not inherently incited to violence in the presence of trans women and feminists are not inevitably drawn to the denunciation or exclusion of trans women.” Rather, it’s something that was learned.

The goal of Gill-Peterson’s book then, is to explain that we are all – whether overtly transmisogynist or not – implicated. “What that comes down to on a more human level is that transmisogyny is everyone’s business,” Gill-Peterson explains. “Not because I’m trying to charge everyone with it, but because the system of gender were all obligated to be a part of makes us all interdependent. So transfemininity might have been pushed to the bottom of the hierarchy, but that position is related to everyone else’s position in the gender ecosystem. I want to talk about how the mistreatment of one group is kind of a collective problem.”

Gill-Peterson paints a picture of transmisogyny that is, like racism, structural and incipient (notably, racism often also plays a part in the persecution of trans femmes). Transmisogyny also works like misogyny at large, she says, in making examples of women who are perceived to be “too much” or “too disruptive”. By placing transmisogyny in relation to misogyny in general, Gill-Peterson’s work follows in the footsteps of writers like Viviane Namaste or Julia Serrano, and like the best-selling book The Transgender Issue, by Shon Faye, it attempts to explain how we reached the deeply transphobic culture of Britain today.

“We need to understand the disgust and violence levelled at trans women if we’re ever going to change it" - Morgan M Page.

“As a culture, the UK has a lot to answer for when it comes to hating trans women – they’ve made it a sport, a politic, and for some, a cult,” explains trans historian and writer Morgan M Page, whose work – like Gill-Peterson’s – explores the social conditions and relations that make up trans people’s lives in particular historical moments. Transphobia has reached what feels like an apex today; as of 2023, reports of anti-trans hate crimes in Britain reached an all-time high.

In February 2024, Rishi Sunak stood in the House of Commons and made a jibe about trans women’s right to self-determine their gender. That day, Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, the 16-year-old trans girl who was murdered in a UK park in 2023, was attending the Commons. Elsewhere, stand-up specials “by popular has-beens” made up mainly of cruel jokes appear regularly on streaming services, points out Page, and novels about “cross-dressing killers, written by absurdly wealthy writers” have made the bestseller lists. “The UK is high on transmisogyny, it’s addicted to the rush of kicking some of the most vulnerable of our society.”

All of this can make trans misogyny feel like a very modern problem. However, as one of the sharpest lines in Gill-Peterson’s book puts it: “TERFS didn’t invent transmisogyny nor did they put a particularly original spin on it”. Looking at the colonial history of transmisogyny, for instance, lets us view trans-exclusionary radical feminists in a broader context of what Gill-Peterson calls “British Empire revivalism” – as white feminists who, post-Brexit, have close relationships with state actors and feel insecure about their power and role.

“We need to understand the disgust and violence levelled at trans women if we’re ever going to change it,” summarises Page, yet this task creates another dilemma. Along with the difficulty of looking at trans histories when the concept of transgender itself has shifted so much over time, how do we talk about trans histories without only focusing on violence, or how trans identity was formed in the image of the oppressor?

“There is a risk in writing a book about violence that you end up reasserting the centrality of that violence,” Gill-Peterson agrees. “But I think part of what makes transmisogyny so particularly cruel is that it revels in violence and also denies it. The worst things that routinely happen to trans women go unnoticed, are normalised, or denied as real violence. Sometimes transfeminine people are even positioned as the perpetrators of violence.” We could think here of how some feminists pose trans women as a threat to their safety – particularly in public bathrooms. “For me, what it means to take the risk of going there and spending so much time on transmisogyny is to insist on reality, to show the structure of violence has a pattern and a history.” For Gill-Peterson, naming the violence should be a starting place for moving past it.

The same applies to social justice movements, too, she adds. Too often, trans women and particularly Black trans women are held up as the most vulnerable in our society, which can have a degrading effect. “This is the strangeness of the world we live in today – everyone knows, whatever their politics, that violence against trans women is a huge issue. But I don’t know if that’s done anything to make the world more hospitable for trans women.”

One answer for moving past the spectacle of violence towards trans people is to be conscious of how we tell their stories, and how we select those stories we choose to seek out. Reading A Short History of Trans Misogyny, one can feel Gill-Peterson going to lengths to animate and honour the rich lives of the femmes she writes about through archival research. Page’s work takes a similar focus (check out Harsh Reality, her podcast about a particularly exploitative early 2000s reality show).

Page offers other examples: “A new play by two young trans women is about to open at Soho Theatre called 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals. The HBO documentary The Stroll is another great piece exploring the history of trans sex working women in NYC’s meatpacking districts, and D Smith’s brilliant documentary KOKOMO CITY centres on the experiences of Black trans women sex workers, as well as the ways transmisogynoir shapes their lives.”

“It’s to our own peril that we don’t lift [trans women and femmes] up" - Jules Gill-Peterson.

Gill-Peterson, meanwhile, suggests checking out the work of artist Tourmaline, who reconstructs Black trans histories through her films, often with a spiritual element. Start with the film Salacia, currently showing at the Tate Modern, which images the life of Mary Jones, a Black trans woman and sex worker who lived in antebellum New York City, or the 2017 short Happy Birthday, Marsha!, which depicts Johnson and Rivera in the hours before the Stonewall Riots.

As well as engaging with stories about the nuance and multitude of trans lives, to truly work to overcome transmisogyny we need a broader shift in mindset, says Gill-Peterson. One starting place is to look back at that moment in history when a distinction was made between gay people and trans people. “After the Stonewall Riots, there was a moment when poor street queens were unceremoniously ejected from the gay rights movement, as too disruptive and too disreputable.” In her book, she offers the example of Rivera getting booed off stage at New York City’s Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in 1973. “This is a gesture that some anti-trans feminists then start picking up in the 70s as well – the idea that trans people will ruin the movement for everyone else because they’re trashy and deceitful.”

We need to ask ourselves, says Gill-Peterson, what did we give up at that moment? “Gay and lesbian rights have experienced tremendous successes partly by becoming “respectable”, by saying: ‘Hey, sexual orientation is kind of a private choice, but ultimately we’re healthy men and women, not like those people. One of the things that has given us all pause is that this was not a successful strategy, homophobia is still incredibly good politics – the US is consumed by political homophobia right now.” See for instance, Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. “It doesn’t seem to me that selling out trans women and femmes to secure gay and lesbian rights even worked. What we can do, is come back to lessons from some of the poorest and most mistreated in the LGBTQ+ movement to think about how to respond to the political crises we’re facing today.”

A return to the idea of “gay” as what it once meant could shape a radical demand for a more just society, says Gill-Peterson. “Ultimately, we have not been giving credit where due; transfeminised people have a broad understanding of coalition work, solidarity, making demands that go beyond the narrow demands of traditional politics. They know the world better than anyone, the hypocrisies, what’s valued and what is it, what makes people tick – because they’ve had to understand it to survive. It’s to our own peril that we don’t lift them up.”

Whether they identified as transgender or not, in a sense, trans people have always been there, and they have always shown ingenuity and built community in the face of transphobia and particularly transmisogyny. “With that in mind,” Gill-Peterson concludes, “aren’t we going to want transfeminised people at the centre of our movement?”

This interview is taken from the March 2024 issue of GAY TIMES. Head to Apple News + for more exclusive features and interviews from the issue. 

The post The gay rights movement sold out trans women – now we’re all reckoning with the consequences appeared first on GAY TIMES.