QUEER Biennial Collective is pleased to announce the second installment of the international arts and performance event: “QUEER Biennial II, Yooth: Loss and Found.” Our program will look closely at how the AIDS epidemic influenced artists that came of age during the 1980-90s; exploring potential connections for a new generation of artists reflect on this lineage within QUEER history.
Enrique Castrejon
QUEER Biennial is an international survey focusing on current moments in OUT/QUEER/LGBTQ art and culture and will showcase emerging, mid-career, and established artists. Our June iteration is dedicated to the memory of our brothers and sisters in so cruelly murdered in Orlando, Florida.
Featured work includes installation, film, live performance, and historical documentation. Thirty years is a long stretch—almost long enough to settle into a comfortable amnesia, with the passing of time serving as a medicament for a painful period that profoundly changed a QUEER generation. A period marked with angst, confusion and death—a QUEER generation traumatized—from back-of-the-page news reports of a virus affecting men in Los Angeles in the early eighties to reports of a “gay cancer” in major cities across the US through the nineties. These dark days sent chilling reminders across the country and the world of our mortality and how fear can create divisiveness as well as hatred pointed to an already marginalized people. It also prompted a call to arms and united a disparate QUEER community that was shaken from a warm glow of sexual freedoms and advances in gay rights in the mid-to late seventies. For many that came-of-age during this time, looking back is a return to a psychological battleground their youth.
Daphne Von Rey
QUEER artists at work during that tumultuous period grappled with this deathly zeitgeist and perhaps cast a dark shadow on a younger generation of queer artists. Some of today’s QUEER artists reflect on that arc of QUEER history while others point in other directions that include socio-political issues, gender identity, conceptualism, history/herstory, candy-coated escapism, and of course loves/sex/death. In “QUEER Biennial II,” we will compare and contrast these points of departure but also revel in the celebration of youth through what this multi-generational queer assembly collectively has to say.
Daniel Hellmann
Other venues include:
Tom of Foundation, Please Do Not Enter, Pieter Space, PAM. For complete listing of artists, venues, dates and time visit: http://www.queerbiennial.com
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