Abstract

The theme of the proposal is an enquiry into what constitutes contemporary queer art practices within a temporality of a residence-based community.

2017 was marked by the first-of-a-kind Queer British Art 1861-1967 exhibition at Tate, curated by Clare Barlow. Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, has pointed out that such offering of ‘pre-history” of the queer presence is in part unavoidably speculative in the “aim to capture the diversity and ambiguity of its artists-protagonists’ (Barlow, 2017, p.7). In the same year, Alex Pilcher defined the investigation into queer art history as “the fertile interrelationship between art and the modern queer experience” (2017, p. 7). Lord and Meyer have recently expanded their 2013 original publication by 5 additional years covering 130 years of artworks from around the world in their second edition of Art & Queer Culture (2019). All mentioned examples show a recent tendency in finding frames for the art and artists that fall into a broad understanding of queer as an identity or a concept.  These attempts have been defined not by the artists themselves, but by the curators and editors theorising the new ground of queer visual culture. The proposed work comes to challenge this approach and investigate what constitutes contemporary queer art practices not only from the perspective of the researcher but from the perspectives of the artists as well as the viewers.

The proposed presentation is based on the case-study of queer artists residency, a community created for a specific period of time, which has culminated in the experimental exhibition, curated in 2019 in Brighton titled Natural Selection: Aberrant Resynthesis. As a result, the queer practices within the created community will be investigated from three different perspectives allowing for artists’ and viewers’ own understanding on queer aspects of the exhibition in addition to the one-dimensional point of view of the researcher/curator. The outcomes of this case-study are to be presented at the conference in person or online.      

Bio

Victoria Suvoroff is a Brighton-based contemporary artist, independent curator, and Art & Design lecturer in the further education sector (GBMC). She holds an MRes in Arts and Cultural Research (University of Brighton). Her ongoing PhD project (University of Leeds) focuses on the contemporary queer visual art practices in exile.

www.VictoriaSuvoroff.com