Homage: Queer lineages on video

Homage: Queer lineages on video presents works by seven contemporary artists who pay tribute to significant cultural figures and resonant histories. Their works, all made over the last two decades, explore how lens- and time-based media have enabled artists to articulate desiring and melancholic modes of relating across generations and contexts. Intervening in commemorative genres of image making—including portraiture and documentary—through performative acts, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging, these works produce queer forms of kinship. They depart from the preoccupation with visibility and publicness across politics of identity and representation, demonstrating instead the power of anachronistic gestures and formal affinities in reframing relationships between artists and their chosen ancestors.

Homage reflects on the potential of film and video to reorient processes of both commemoration and erasure, emphasizing the affective charge and plurality of meanings created through the combination of image, sound, and text. The body and the archive are implicated across a number of practices that consider the lived experiences and legacies of illness, which have catalyzed communities of care and networks of solidarity. Such critical intimacies generate modes of memorialization—of paying homage—that disturb canonicity and heroization through constant creative reinterpretation.

All the works in the exhibition are drawn from Akeroyd Collection, the moving image facet of the Shane Akeroyd Art Collection. Akeroyd Collection operates to make the film and video work in the collection available through a dedicated website, film screenings, and loans to international arts institutions. The collection overall reflects the intellectual, political, and aesthetic impulses of contemporary art and its discourses, reflecting the pressing issues of our time.