Over the years, STIR has covered several engaging artists associated with the global queer community. Many of these artists have pushed back against societal dogma and have even incurred great personal risks in their pursuit of artmaking.
As we reflect on Pride Month, we list eight queer practices that captured our
imaginations and never let go.
1. Kim Leutwyler on the articulation of gender and sexual identity
Kim Leutwyler (pronouns in flux) is an Australian artist who has made a global impression for their intimate queer portraiture. The artist challenges commonly held perspectives around beauty through their portraits of LGBTQIA+ people who have inspired them in some way. These could be friends, or as in the case of works such as Heyman (2017), queer public figures like Australian footballer Michelle Heyman.
Leutwyler continues to work on queer portraiture and has also created stunning landscape works over the years.
2. Cassils’ ‘PISSED’ – 200 gallons of urine tank – acquired by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
Trans performance artist Cassils (they/them) has a challenging practice. They have even worked with their excreta in the past. Their 2017 installation work PISSED was created with their urine, collected over 200 days and stored in a glass cube. They initiated this work following the 45th President of the United States Donald Trump’s rollback of an executive order passed during his predecessor Barack Obama’s tenure, which empowered transgender students to use the bathroom corresponding to their preferred gender identities.
More recently, Cassils led an iteration of their frenetic and sensual debut dance performance work Human Measure (2022), for International Transgender Day of Visibility 2024 (March 31). Materially, the performance created a large cloth that had been treated with cyanotype solution and now carried the imprint of the trans bodies it had come in contact with, presenting a powerful statement of indelibility for the trans community.
The Indian-British-Canadian photographer Sunil Gupta is recognised widely for his landmark photography series Exiles, which explored the dynamics of gay men sighted at monuments in Delhi in 1986-87. Gupta’s portraits of queer intimacy were presented in Cruising at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2022.
Gupta is currently part of a group exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery, People, Places, Things, which documents intimacy through the works of various contemporary artists and photographers. Vintage photographs by Gupta were also shown by the gallery in Sunil Gupta. Vintage photographs from 1982-87 as part of their participation in Art Basel 2024. He is also currently showing work at Lovers: Ten Years on & Lovers, Revisited, which is on at The Art House, Yorkshire from June 15 – August 31, 2024.
4. Macidiano Céspedes’ works derail heteronormative structures
Macidiano Céspedes is a noteworthy queer photographer from Peru, a nation where the LGBTQIA+ community faces particular social and systemic marginalisation.
Céspedes pursues a documentary-style photography practice that seeks to bring to light the invisibility and histories of the Peruvian queer community.
More recently, the photographer has begun documenting the articles that visitors bring to their loved ones incarcerated in Peru’s jails, creating a subversive portrayal of criminality that is both tragic and tender.
5. Exploring the vivid and alien world of Gabriel Massan
Gabriel Massan (they/them) is a celebrated new media artist whose practice stretches across digital art, performance art, video games and more. The Brazilian artist is noteworthy for highly detailed critical fiction narratives in their work.
Massan creates surreal, vibrant worlds that speak to the experiences of Black Indigenous people in Latin America, and has recently presented the interactive installation work Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak (2024) at Tono, the festival of moving images in Mexico.
Continuity Flaws builds on Third World: The Bottom Dimension (2023), a video game by Massan and other collaborators, commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies of Serpentine Galleries in London, the United Kingdom.
While Third World: The Bottom Dimension critiques the politics of colonialism that play out in cyberspace, Continuity Flaws explores our current juncture in late-stage capitalism, suggesting that we can now see cracks in many of the major institutions that hold up the world order.
6. Set in Mexico, the film ‘Honey to the Moon’ intersects queer love with surrealism
Rob Woodcox is a fine art photographer and film director from the United States. In late 2023, the American artist made his directorial debut with the sensual short film Honey to the Moon, which premiered at the Oscar-qualifying Provincetown International Film Festival. The film explores queer bodies in the throes of love and loss, and much like Woodcox’s photographic work, has a strong surreal charge.
Recently, Woodcox directed album visuals for American house music duo Sofi Tukker’s album Bread, which is set to be released in August 2024.
7. Art and anthropology intersect in Samak Kosem’s interdisciplinary practice
Samak Kosem is an artist and anthropologist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Tallinn, Estonia. He documents sex work and queerness, especially within Thai Muslim culture.
Kosem approaches artmaking as a visual ethnographer, combining objects, text and documentary filmmaking to create portraits of prostitution and queerness that allow the participants in his work to take charge of their narratives.
Kosem is working on various projects in 2024, one of which is a study of masculinity in the Shan community, stretching across Southeast Asia.
8. James Nguyen on language and the fluidity of meaning in ‘Open Glossary’
Australian artist James Nguyen works across performance art, video art, drawing and installation art, often in close collaboration with friends and family.
Nguyen’s work takes a decolonial approach towards exploring queer politics and culture in the Global South. Recently, he showed Open Glossary with various collaborators at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne, Australia. The show ran from September 16 – November 19, 2023, and explored the potential of language to unify and divide us.
These are some of our top picks from the many phenomenal queer artists that STIR has had the pleasure of covering.
As the international LGBTQIA+ community continues to march boldly forward, with greater visibility and advocacy than ever before, it continues to make original art that tells important stories. And we at STIR are always listening, eager to bring you more voices in the years ahead. Happy Pride Month!