The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University presents Homage: Queer lineages on video, an exhibition of eight time-based works by contemporary artists who use single- and multi-channel video installations to pay tribute to formative figures and overlooked histories. Curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal, the exhibition upends conventional modes of commemorative image making, such as portraiture, documentary, and monuments, by foregrounding performative interventions, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging.
In their video works, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Tony Cokes, Carolyn Lazard, Kang Seung Lee, P. Staff, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul preference desiring, melancholic and reflexive forms of relationality across generations through works that posit queer forms of kinship. In a challenge to the preoccupation with visibility and publicness across the politics of identity and representation, these works demonstrate the potential of anachronistic gestures, formal affinities, and archival adjacencies in reframing relationships between artists and their chosen ancestors. The resulting constellation reveals modes of memorialization–of paying homage–that disturb canonicity and heroization through constant creative reinterpretation.
Some of the artists engage with formal structures and characteristics of experimental film and early video. Disparate legacies of these avant-garde forms of the 1960s and 1970s are made manifest in their contemporary works, which surface issues of landscape and ecology (Weerasethakul), disability and perception (Lazard), and representation and narcissism (Bopape). Deploying sound, slowness, flash, and flicker, these artists attempt a queer reorientation of spectatorial sensibilities, directing them towards questions of place, identity, and access while retaining visual tropes of experimental moving-image practices.
Queer subjects and their ongoing investments in nurturing resistance, artistic expression, and joy are mobilized in installations by Lee, Cokes, Staff, and Tiravanija. As diverse artists across generations address the ongoing impact of HIV/AIDS on culture and lived experience, significant actors and histories from different contexts are brought into affective dialogue. The body is addressed and implicated across all these works, which consider the legacies and lived experiences of illness that have catalyzed communities of care and networks of solidarity among the living and the long departed.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 68-page publication with contributions by Rattanamol Singh Johal, Binghao Wong, Piper Marshall, Gaëtan Thomas, and Lynton Talbot.