My TRADE experience – London 1990’s

With the exhibition “My TRADE experience – London 1990’s” Philip Pedersen portrays the subcultural world of the legendary gay club Trade.

Philip describes Trade as, ¨The ultimate club playing the most hard pumping house and techno music. Trade attracted a top dedicated crowd of mega muscle men, club freaks, transgender and hardcore ravers. All searching the ultimate ecstasy in dancing and sex, living only for the moment, in a time when AIDS was way too present.¨

The exhibition consists of documenting photos and photos of paintings, all in print montaged on aluminium. By equating photos and paintings in format and print, it gives a very clear and direct view of Philip Pedersens artistic practice in the 90’s where his lifestyle and art melted together.

Philip Pedersen graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine arts 1987-1996 and has exhibited in Denmark, London, San Francisco and Cusco

About My Trade, Philip Pedersen tells QX:

¨In search of adventure and on 4 trips I ended up at Trade by coincidence in the summer of 1993 and had an experience so mind blowing that it changed my world view for good.

Through a wall of frightening loud music I descended to a world filled with a fierce mix of ultra underground people wildly dancing in rooms that smelled of poppers and was condensed of sweat dripping from the ceilings and the walls were decorated with fluorescent pop-art paintings in vivid colors.

Around the restrooms people standing wide eyed and with chewing jaws and talking about how unbelievably amazing they felt and from the cubicles you could hear people having sex. What a relief it was just to float into this magical world of pleasure.

The ultra erotic music started out from the most funky house and every hour the music turned wilder and wilder and so did the atmosphere, and it culminated in hardcore industrial techno so distorted, so extremely hard that I felt sadness that it felt so good. Never before or after had I heard music that took me on such highs, never had I experienced a gay club that rough or seen so many gays not giving a damn, it was like a mega hardcore East End opium den full of raw lust.

This craziness slowly softened as it got closer to the end and became more and more beautiful and ended in paradise like music and lifted the crowd into a jeering and whistling ecstasy, all totally exhausted but totally satisfied by the more than 9 hour long journey through all emotions, what a trip!!!

I was completely overwhelmed finding something that ultimate, more than my wildest imagination and amazed that something as synthetic as designer drugs and electronic music could bring one into the deepest depths of the soul. My sense of intensity, width, depth and height was forever changed.

Throughout the 90’s I lived in London on and off, totally hooked on this lifestyle and had to try to catch some of this magic, this zeitgeist.

I photographed suitable models I found at Trade in Turnmills where Trade took place and on other gay locations and changed to a painting style that mixed elements from club flyers, Trade deco, London gay magazines, tattoos, my photos and chinese cartoons made in acrylic with glitter, pearls and plastic wig hair as structure and it’s a selection of these, my beloved memorabilia that makes “My TRADE Experience-London 1990’s”.´