God only knows how many exhibitions I’ve seen this year alone. The more shows I’ve seen - museum & gallery-scaled - the more cognizant I become of particular trends, developments, or events occurring in the Art World’s trajectory. The Wallach Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, was a timely reminder of the renewed interest and vigor of video art as a medium in 2025. With digital technology taking the reins in how moving image works are processed and disseminated, I had my concerns for the last few years about whether or not video art would become obsolete, or rather if there really could be such a thing as new video art in today’s screen culture. Thankfully, Homage begs to differ in denoting the new lease on life video is getting on contextual, formal, narrative, and functional grounds through a selection of 10 works by 7 artists made between 2005 and 2022. All the more fitting when considering the theme of Wallach Art Gallery’s current exhibition is about Queer History and Queer Temporality, both of which are important conceptual frameworks that have been a part of video art’s history from the beginning.
Curated by University of Michigan, Ann Arbor art historian & professor Rattanamol Singh Johal, Homage features works by 7 leading contemporary artists who each employ sight and sound to not only honor the legacies of important figures in recent queer history, but to also generate new perspectives and insights on queerness, community, resilience, and memory. In effect, this exhibition articulates how video's role in documentation, interpretation, and depiction bridges the queer past with the queer present - a total dismantling of heteronormative, linear time in preference for the alternative realm of queer temporality / queer time.
All 10 of the video works in this exhibition derive from the Akeroyd Collection, one of the most important repositories for the preservation of video, film, and moving image art.
...
Read full article at whitehotmagazine.com
