Sunday Arts Magazine

10 Apr 2022

Pip Wallis Curator Contemporary Art talks about Queer Places

History

From the home to the artists studio to the streets, physical spaces have often sought out by queer people as sites of refuge, safety, desire, community, and resistance. One such space is the bathhouse, which has long been a meeting place for queer people, often men, to engage in sexual activity. The endurance of this queer space has been inscribed into artworks across centuries, from Albrecht Durer’s coded depiction of men being entertained by musicians as they wash and socialize, to Hoda Afshar’s intimate photograph of men embracing amid the steam.

 

A similarly persistent queer space is that of the nightclub, which is represented in such works as Paulien Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Moving backwards, set in what the artists describe as ‘an abstract club’ and Viva Gibb’s photograph of Melbourne’s former hybrid queer venue Trish’s Coffee Lounge. The occupation and reclamation of public space by queer people is also explored by several artists, including Tourmaline, whose video work Atlantic is a sea of bones, records the Hudson River, Meatpacking District and piers in New York as active sites for Black, queer and trans life in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

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