Artists’ Platform

During lockdown, we commissioned Charice Bhardwaj, Carina Miles, Caleb Parkin and Oren Shoesmith to work with us on queering the museum. At our live event, which you can watch below, the artists shared some of their initial work and talked about their process. What are the challenges when working on the collections without being able to visit the museum? What ideas and forms of collaboration have emerged in their practice as artists? How can we queer the museum and engage with the collections at a distance?

The event featured conversations about queer and trans art, thinking and practice, as the artists covered a range of topics and themes including: the rejected gay sand of collector Ivor Treby, poetry inspired by scattered language and the art of queer failure, a variety of tiny objects (including a 19th-century matchbox) leading to the discovery of a small queer world of pink hares and dark cupboards, and finding queer and trans resonances in religious stories of transformation.