★★★★★ by Ifan Llewelyn
“Triggered non-binary millennial lefty snowflakes.” Any conversation around gender and identity has become highly contentious, and pushing a progressive agenda on the issue will always be met with derision and dismissal. Though it might not be happening in the most productive way, the conversation is happening. People’s perceptions are shifting.
It’s rare that an exhibition comes along and encompasses a palpable cultural shift. In her essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, Virginia Woolf declared that ‘humanity had changed… on or about December 1910’ following the ‘Manet and Post-Impressionists’ exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries. The pervading naturalism of Impressionism that dominated the art scene at the turn of the twentieth century had been uprooted, dismantled and set alight. We’re still riding the wave of that dismantling, with the parameters of what constitutes art being ever-expanding. It’s not overstating to say that Kiss My Genders at the Hayward Gallery signals yet another monumental shift in our culture around the issue of identity, where labels dissolve in the rushing current of gender fluidity.
As the exhibition iterates throughout, this is a conversation that has always been simmering beneath the binary, and in some cases before the gender binary was imposed. Resisting the linearity of a constructed gender history narrative of the past 50 years, walking into the exhibition you’re free to ramble where your interest draws you. Cultural utterances of gender are sundry and perhaps arguably infinite, and each of the over 30 artists featured in the exhibitions brings with them a compelling complication to our western ideas of gender expression, from the historical to the representational, even down to the biological.
Playing a principal role in this exhibition are its collections of photography, being, of course, the most representational art form. The works of New York-based artist Catherine Opie are perhaps the most recognisable since they ignited a conversation all their own in the early ‘90s in their depictions of non-normative identities. Decades on ‘Mike and Sky’ still feels boundary-pushing in its manipulation of historic portraiture, with the stark royal blue commanding the gaze to linger a few moments.
Alongside her work hangs Zanele Muholi the visual activist who is currently setting the trail alight with her work that not only speaks to cultural change but is cultural change standing in a dress of condoms while her country is ravaged by an unspoken AIDS crisis. If gender and identity weren’t complicated enough, the political and social issues they intersect with gives the issue a cosmological scale. In the case of Muholi’s work, her investment in combating the issues facing trans, non-binary and intersex people living in South Africa speaks to one of the more pressing argument that has to be made.
There truly is no personal argument to be made that isn’t political, which is what many of this work engages with. Even Jes Fan’s sculpture on the biology of testosterone engages in a conversation of biopolitics, as she reduces the human body to a pipe structure as drooping globs of depo-testosterone-filled glass cling to its form. Fan’s sculptures pose one of the most compelling arguments against the status-quo of sex and gender, asking why our bodily make-up influences so much of our cultural experiences. If we are all a collection of cells formed and running on chemicals, then where are our gendered assumptions based?
The issue of identity is not one to be siphoned off, hung up, and studied since for all of us it is how we interact with the world, though doing so can be useful in thinking about it. Embracing the living consequence of identity, the installations, video work and sculpture that invade and intrude on the gallery space are welcomed interruptions. Though the spiralling, silver-draped video installation by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings exploring queer spaces in Blackpool sustains an interesting conversation between a hyper-masculine gay club and drag cabaret club Funny Girls, the exhibition’s crescendo comes with ‘Looners’. The work of London-based Jenkin van Zyl is undeniably stunning, in every sense of the word. Walking up through the doorway of a haunted train ride, through draped ties you enter a run-down cinema that feels somewhere between Torture Garden and The London Dungeons. The video work rejects the binary distinction between the real and the virtual, immersing you in a horrorscape of inflated latex beasts and queered masculine violence. Despite the oozing blood and pierced flesh, there remains something seductively carnal in the work.
Bewildered by the expansive world of gender identity, questioning what it really means to be anything, head reeling from the sprawling scope of arguments, counter-arguments and polemics on gender and identity, you buckle under the infinitude of the issue. But is that a bad thing? Sometimes getting lost is how you happen across the right path. You leave bemused, but not before catching a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye as you walk downstairs. A silver projection of two dancing figures in glittering retro getups, doing some funky dancing. Martine Gutierrez’s ‘Clubbing’. Watching them jiving and doing the twist, both Gutierrez in drag, as they thrust and jiggle against a sequined backdrop, you can’t help but smile at their gentle humanity.
Kiss My Gender is at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank SE1 8XX until the 8th of September. Get tickets at SouthbankCentre.co.uk.
