red light blue night watch

2023

The works in the exhibition red light blue night watch take their references and inspiration from archival material, stories and warning signals amongst historical queer communities across time and location.

Heather Love writes about historical relations to queer pasts in her book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2009). She describes how queer subjects build imagined communities of the marginal and the excluded across time through “strange fellowships” and “partial connections.” This has to do not only with self-identification with queer historical subjects but also the need to “touch” and perhaps alter the past to make sense of the present. Queer history becomes a critique of the discourse of historiography and history itself, as something that has been left out.