Most queer folks aren’t privileged with having queer dad and mom, so many people look to those that got here earlier than as function fashions. In Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, artists draw upon the legacies of parents who opened the doorways we now get to stroll by means of. It’s price a go to for anybody to broaden their horizons of what queerness would possibly imply, and to find histories usually left untold.
Positioned on the Wallach Artwork Gallery, in Columbia College’s new, Renzo Piano-designed Lenfest Heart for the Arts, Homage takes benefit of the constructing’s excessive ceilings and versatile configurations as in comparison with the gallery’s former, extra cramped quarters. On this exhibition of eight items by seven artists, drawn from the Akeroyd Assortment, 4 pairings emerge. Evaluating and contrasting them can open a window into the present.
Tony Cokes, “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021)
Works by each Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kang Seung Lee method nature from a queer, nonlinear perspective. With “For Bruce” (2022), Weerasethakul, a legendary Thai filmmaker, presents an homage to Bruce Baille, whose movies superimpose and overlay footage in modern methods. Weerasethakul’s equally unorthodox landscapes, impressed by Baille, can turn into a foil to the unorthodox queer narratives in his personal movies. For “Garden” (2018), Lee performs rituals within the gardens of the respective properties the place English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and Korean poet and activist Oh Joon-soo lived. Lee attracts on sheepskin parchment at every backyard, digs a gap, after which buries the parchment as a type of alternate and kinship with these artists, each of whom died of AIDS.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “For Bruce” (2022)
Kang Seung Lee, “Garden” (2018)
Lee shifts his focus to bounce with “The Heart of a Hand” (2022), through which Filipino dancer Serafin pays tribute to choreographer Goh Choo San. The latter was born in Singapore, however grew to become a singular presence within the American ballet scene within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties earlier than succumbing to AIDS in 1987. Tony Cokes additionally appears on the methods folks specific themselves by means of dance, on this case turning to nightclubs. In “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021), home music backs a parade of brightly coloured phrases that designate the style’s origins as an alternative choice to disco for Chicago’s Black and Brown queer communities.
Kang Seung Lee, “The Heart of a Hand” (2022)
Tony Cokes, “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021)
P. Workers’s “The Foundation” (2015) and Rirkrit’s Tiravanija’s “United (John Giorno reads)” (2008) each look at how we uncover queer forebears by means of the archives we’ve inherited. Workers alternates footage of the Tom of Finland basis in Los Angeles and its custodians with an experimental theater set to ask questions on who creates, cares for, and phases the archive of such iconic figures. In 2008, Tiravanija collaborated with John Giorno to create a 10-hour video compendium of the latter studying his poems and memoirs, and performing his music.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, “United (John Giorno reads)” (2008)
P. Workers, “The Foundation” (2015)
Each Carolyn Lazard in “Red” (2021) and Dineo Seshee Bopape in “a love supreme” (2005–6) lead with abstraction to discover identities outdoors of the White, ableist cisgender patriarchy that buildings our society. Bopape licks streaks of chocolate that counsel summary expressionist brushwork off a clear pane of glass, proudly owning her eroticism as a queer lady of shade. Lazard pays homage to Tony Conrad’s warning about epileptic dangers in his strobing movie “The Flicker” (1966) by creating flickering crimson iPhone footage of their thumb, together with a warning display that claims “strobe on.” As noble because the artist’s intentions are to lift questions round entry, ableism, and being immunocompromised, the work lacks the impression of the artist’s “A Recipe for Disaster” (2018) or a transparent reference to queerness.
Dineo Seshee Bopape, “a love supreme” (2005–6)
Carolyn Lazard, “Red” (2021)
These are small quibbles in relation to the general present, nonetheless. What’s really good about Homage is how curator Rattanamol Singh Johal makes use of video artwork’s nonlinearity to current the nonlinear ways in which queer folks draw on the legacies of those that got here earlier than them. In doing so, they create their very own definitions of queerness.
Homage: Queer Lineages on Video continues on the Wallach Artwork Gallery (615 West 129th Road, sixth Ground, Manhattan) by means of October 19. The exhibition was curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal.
