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Header pic: Kent Monkman

This summer, Hayward Gallery presents Kiss My Genders, a group exhibition celebrating more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity.

Spanning the past 50 years, Kiss My Genders brings together over 100 artworks by different generations of artists from around the world. Employing a wide range of approaches, these 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 places a particular emphasis on works that revisit the tradition of photographic portraiture. A number of artists in the exhibition treat the body itself as sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form.

ZANELE MUHOLI Phila I, Parktown, 2016

Participating artists include: Ajamu, Travis Alabanza, Amrou Al-Kadhi & Holly Falconer, Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Flo Brooks, Luciano Castelli, Jimmy DeSana, Jes Fan, Chitra Ganesh, Martine Gutierrez, Nicholas Hlobo, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Joan Jett Blakk, Tarek Lakhrissi, Zoe Leonard, Ad Minoliti, Pierre Molinier, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Planningtorock, Christina Quarles, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Hunter Reynolds, Athi-Patra Ruga, Tejal Shah, Victoria Sin, Jenkin van Zyl, Del LaGrace Volcano.

Kiss My Genders plays host to a number of artists who 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); and Amrou Al-Kadhi, a British-Iraqi writer, drag performer and filmmaker, who in collaboration with British photographer Holly Falconer, created a 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 this exhibition 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); and 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.

TEJAL SHAH, Southern siren,. 2006

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.

Taking place across the entire Hayward Gallery, Kiss My Genders also extends 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, while a series of flags designed by Minoliti will also adorn the roof of Royal Festival Hall. Elsewhere on site, 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, and a poem by Tarek Lakhrissi – ‘Glory’ – will greet visitors as they approach the stairs leading to Southbank Centre’s Mandela Walk.

Kiss My Genders 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. Also featured in the exhibition catalogue is a roundtable discussion between a number of the artists and exhibition curator Vincent Honoré.

JULIANA HUXTABLE, untitled 2015

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 said: “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.”

 

Kiss My Genders 12 June–8 September 2019 Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX

Prices: £15.50 / £12.50 Members go free

Please note: this exhibition includes nudity and some sexual content

Link to Kiss My Genders web page HERE

Accompanying talks and events programme to be announced in May 2019.

Hayward Gallery opening times: 11am – 7pm every day except Tuesdays when the gallery is closed. Late night opening on Thursdays until 9pm

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Fifi Goldberg

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