Most queer people aren’t privileged with having queer parents, so many of us look to those who came before as role models. In Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, artists draw upon the legacies of folks who opened the doors we now get to walk through. It’s worth a visit for anyone to broaden their horizons of what queerness might mean, and to discover histories often left untold.
Located at the Wallach Art Gallery, in Columbia University’s new, Renzo Piano-designed Lenfest Center for the Arts, Homage takes advantage of the building’s high ceilings and flexible configurations as compared to the gallery’s former, more cramped quarters. In this exhibition of eight pieces by seven artists, drawn from the Akeroyd Collection, four pairings emerge. Comparing and contrasting them can open a window into the show.
Works by both Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kang Seung Lee approach nature from a queer, nonlinear perspective. With “For Bruce” (2022), Weerasethakul, a legendary Thai filmmaker, presents an homage to Bruce Baille, whose films superimpose and overlay footage in innovative ways. Weerasethakul’s similarly unorthodox landscapes, inspired by Baille, can become a foil to the unorthodox queer narratives in his own films. For “Garden” (2018), Lee performs rituals in the gardens of the respective homes where English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and Korean poet and activist Oh Joon-soo lived. Lee draws on sheepskin parchment at each garden, digs a hole, and then buries the parchment as a form of exchange and kinship with these artists, both of whom died of AIDS.
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