Exhibition

Kiss My Genders – Group Show

Southbank Centre - Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom
12 Jun 2019 - 08 Sep 2019

Juliana Huxtable, ​Untitled (Lil’ Marvel) , Detail, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and JTT, New York © Juliana Huxtable, 2019

Juliana Huxtable, ​Untitled (Lil’ Marvel) , Detail, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and JTT, New York © Juliana Huxtable, 2019

This summer, Hayward Gallery presents​ Kiss My Genders​, a group exhibition celebrating more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity. Spanning the past 50 years, ​Kiss My Genders​ brings together over 100 artworks by different generations of artists from around the world.

Employing a wide range of approaches, these artists share an interest in articulating and engaging with ​gender fluidity, as well as with non-binary, trans and intersex identities. While the artists in​ Kiss My Genders​ work across a wide variety of media – including installation, video, painting, sculpture and wall drawings – the exhibition places a particular emphasis on works that revisit the tradition of photographic portraiture. A number of artists in the exhibition treat the body itself as sculpture, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form.

Kiss My Genders​ plays host to a number of artists who explore gender expression through performance, drag and masquerade. Participating artists include: ​Ajamu, Travis Alabanza, Amrou Al-Kadhi & Holly Falconer,Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Flo Brooks, Luciano Castelli, Jimmy DeSana, Jes Fan, Chitra Ganesh, MartineGutierrez, Nicholas Hlobo, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Joan Jett Blakk, TarekLakhrissi, Zoe Leonard, Ad Minoliti, Pierre Molinier, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi,Catherine Opie, Planningtorock, Christina Quarles, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings,Hunter Reynolds, Athi-Patra Ruga, Tejal Shah, Victoria Sin, Jenkin van Zyl, DelLaGrace Volcano.

The exhibition’s title is taken from the song ‘Transome’ by Bolton-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter, Planningtorock, who will also perform as part of the exhibition’s public programme.

 

Selected Event(s):

Nicholas Hlobo in Conversation with Elvira Dyangani Ose

Wed 19 June 2019
7.00pm, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
Approximate run time: 90 mins

An opportunity to hear renowned visual artist Nicholas Hlobo discuss his work in relation to Hayward Gallery’s group exhibition Kiss My Genders. Join Hlobo for a conversation with curator and academic Elvira Dyangani Ose about his artistic practice, set against the social and political context of post-apartheid South Africa.

Hlobo (b. 1975, Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg and crafts his wall-based works and sculptures from found objects and materials that include leather, ribbons and rubber. Selecting his materials for the associations they carry, as well as their formal properties, Hlobo purposefully brings together what he has described as the ‘sex and industrialisation’ of rubber with the ‘femininity and labour’ of his intricately stitched, brightly coloured ribbons. Concerned with the history of South Africa and the way that colonialism continues to shape contemporary life, Hlobo’s work also draws on and explores his identity as a gay Xhosa man. For the artist, these sensual, biomorphic forms – part human, part marine creature, part mythical beast – speak to the fluid and unstable nature of gender and identity, forever in a state of flux.

 

 

www.southbankcentre.co.uk