This summer the Hayward Gallery presents from June 12 – September 8, Kiss My Genders, a new and extensive, group exhibition of over thirty international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity.
SPANNING the past 50 years, Kiss My Genders will bring together over 100 artworks by different generations of artists from around the world.
Employing a wide range of approaches, the participating artists share an interest in articulating and engaging with gender fluidity, as well as with non-binary, trans and intersex identities.
While the artists in Kiss My Genders work across a wide variety of media – including installation, video, painting, sculpture and wall drawings – the exhibition will place a particular emphasis on works that revisit the tradition of photographic portraiture.
A number of artists in the exhibition also treat the body itself as sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form, while others explore gender expression through performance, drag and masquerade.
These include:
- Ajamu, a London-based visual activist whose work challenges conventional understanding of sexuality, desire, pleasure and cultural production within contemporary Britain.
- Brooklyn-based performance artist Martine Gutierrez, who characterises identity as something ‘alien or unfamiliar’ in her ambitious photographic series Masking and Demons (both 2018)
- Amrou Al-Kadhi, a British-Iraqi writer, drag performer and filmmaker, who in collaboration with British photographer Holly Falconer, created the photographic portrait Glamrou (2016) using triple exposure to communicate the experience of being in drag as a person of Muslim heritage.
A number of the artworks in the exhibition will address the broader social and political questions and contexts that intersect with gender identity.
- Concerned with the way that marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’, Juliana Huxtable portrays herself as a mythological character or superhero in a series of powerful self-portraits or ‘self-imaginings’.
- In The Memorial Dress (1993) – a black ball gown printed with the names of 25,000 individuals known to have died of AIDS-related illnesses – artist and AIDS activist Hunter Reynolds uses art as a tool to process trauma as well as transform it.
- London-based artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings explore the politics, histories and aesthetics of queer space in their video installation Something for the Boys (2018)
- In an unsettling series of photographs entitled Crime Scene (2012), Zanele Muholi draws attention to the violence suffered by South Africa’s lesbian and transgender communities.
Kiss My Genders will feature a number of new works and site-specific commissions. In the upper galleries, Jenkin van Zyl, the youngest artist in the exhibition, will present a new, expanded video work, Looners (2019), while Brooklyn-based visual artist Chitra Ganesh – whose work deals with representations of femininity, sexuality and power – will create a site-specific wall drawing.
Kiss My Genders will also extend beyond the gallery walls, with two new commissions that will transform elements of the Southbank Centre site.
Ad Minoliti, an Argentinian artist who uses brightly coloured geometric designs to represent a trans-human utopia, will design Southbank Centre’s Riverside Stage and will also create a series of flags to adorn the roof of Royal Festival Hall.
Elsewhere, South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga will transform the windows of Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery foyer into a striking display of ‘stained glass’ featuring avatars designed by the artist. A poem by Tarek Lakhrissi – ‘Glory’ – will also greet visitors as they approach the stairs leading to Southbank Centre’s Mandela Walk.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring original essays by Amrou Al-Kadhi, Paul Clinton, Charlie Fox, Jack Halberstam, Manuel Segade and Susan Stryker, as well as an excerpt from Renate Lorenz’s influential Queer Art: A Freak Theory, and poetry by Travis Alabanza, Jay Bernard, Nat Raha and Tarek Lakhrissi.
The exhibition’s title is taken from the song ‘Transome’ by Bolton-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter, Planningtorock, who will also perform as part of the exhibition’s public programme.
Vincent Honoré, Guest Curator says: “Kiss My Genders brings together a leading group of international artists who explore and engage with gender identities. Conveyed through a wide range of mediums, this exhibition intends to be a wonderful celebration welcoming the brilliant differences and the rich spectra of genders within our society.”
Event: Kiss My Genders
Where: Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX
When: June 12 – September 8
Time: 11am – 7pm every day except Tuesdays. Late night opening on Thursdays until 9pm.
Cost: Tickets: £15.50 / £12.50. Members go free.
To book tickets online, click here: