Curatorial Projects
Films That Fuck: Re-uses of Pornography in Moving Image Practices During the HIV/AIDS Crisis and the Present
Open City Documentary Festival, London, 7 May 2025
During the initial years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, homophobia from outside the queer community and a fear of infection from within led to a growing erotophobia and stigma around queer sex or pleasure. In order to combat the existential threat posed both sociopolitically and medically, queer artists understood the inadequacies of existing media and developed new strategies for activist moving image. This programme highlights one such strategy, namely pornography, either manipulated or presented as found footage, which was used to celebrate queer sex as a source of pleasure rather than shame. The pornographic also served as a tool with which artists were able to foreground the embodied, their work communicating with a viewer’s body as much as their intellect. Doing so provided an opportunity to document the pain AIDS was inflicting on individual bodies (often those of the artists or those close to them) in opposition to a dominant media narrative which dehumanised the seropositive.
Whilst the works from the AIDS crisis in this programme predominantly focus on cis gay male experiences, their use of the pornographic as an embodied media has influenced contemporary practitioners exploring a wider breadth of queer identity. Also presented in this programme are artistic uses of new forms of pornography that have emerged in the internet age such as popperbate or masturbation instruction videos, which remain a technology through which artists can engage a viewer with corporeality through queer, trans and feminist perspectives.
More information can be found here.
Open City Documentary Festival, London, 7 May 2025
During the initial years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, homophobia from outside the queer community and a fear of infection from within led to a growing erotophobia and stigma around queer sex or pleasure. In order to combat the existential threat posed both sociopolitically and medically, queer artists understood the inadequacies of existing media and developed new strategies for activist moving image. This programme highlights one such strategy, namely pornography, either manipulated or presented as found footage, which was used to celebrate queer sex as a source of pleasure rather than shame. The pornographic also served as a tool with which artists were able to foreground the embodied, their work communicating with a viewer’s body as much as their intellect. Doing so provided an opportunity to document the pain AIDS was inflicting on individual bodies (often those of the artists or those close to them) in opposition to a dominant media narrative which dehumanised the seropositive.
Whilst the works from the AIDS crisis in this programme predominantly focus on cis gay male experiences, their use of the pornographic as an embodied media has influenced contemporary practitioners exploring a wider breadth of queer identity. Also presented in this programme are artistic uses of new forms of pornography that have emerged in the internet age such as popperbate or masturbation instruction videos, which remain a technology through which artists can engage a viewer with corporeality through queer, trans and feminist perspectives.
More information can be found here.
Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc
Cinema Rediscovered, Bristol, 24-28 July 2024
Co-curated with Fedor Tot, this strand featured four films from East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union marking the first retrospective of cinema from this region to focus on queer perspectives. In doing so, it revealed undertold queer histories from this historical moment and brought works which navigate the relationship between the state, collective and individual identity differently.
Many of these films had not been screened since their initial release and have not been restored or recently digitised, providing a rare opportunity to see the persepectives of voices who have been doubly marginalised, as a result of their geography and their identity.
The programme also toured to venues across the UK including the ICA, London; Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham; Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow; Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick.
More information can be found here.
Cinema Rediscovered, Bristol, 24-28 July 2024
Co-curated with Fedor Tot, this strand featured four films from East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union marking the first retrospective of cinema from this region to focus on queer perspectives. In doing so, it revealed undertold queer histories from this historical moment and brought works which navigate the relationship between the state, collective and individual identity differently.
Many of these films had not been screened since their initial release and have not been restored or recently digitised, providing a rare opportunity to see the persepectives of voices who have been doubly marginalised, as a result of their geography and their identity.
The programme also toured to venues across the UK including the ICA, London; Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham; Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow; Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick.
More information can be found here.
What is Development?
Royal College of Art, 15-20 May 2024
This exhibition and public programme presented a range of material produced by curator Grant Watson and artist & Feldenkrais practitioner Yael Davids over the course of their long-term collaboration with residents on London’s Landsdowne Green Estate.
Taking place at the Royal College of Art’s Hangar Gallery, the exhibition included original architectural drawings, interviews with residents and archival material about the estate preserved by residents. A public programme of events included panel discussions with tenants and architectural scholars and demonstrations and lessons of Feldenkrais.
More information can be found here.
Royal College of Art, 15-20 May 2024
This exhibition and public programme presented a range of material produced by curator Grant Watson and artist & Feldenkrais practitioner Yael Davids over the course of their long-term collaboration with residents on London’s Landsdowne Green Estate.
Taking place at the Royal College of Art’s Hangar Gallery, the exhibition included original architectural drawings, interviews with residents and archival material about the estate preserved by residents. A public programme of events included panel discussions with tenants and architectural scholars and demonstrations and lessons of Feldenkrais.
More information can be found here.
Losing Home: Expanded Realities
Open City Documentary Festival, 25-29 April 2024
This exhibition featured five non-fiction works which used moving image practices in the broadest sense of the term to address the sensation of alienation from a domestic environment. These works by Aay Liparoto, Alice Bucknell, Ben Joseph Andrews & Emma Roberts, Nick Smith and Patricia Echeverria Liras allowed viewers to inhabit bodies, relationships and built environments which have, each in their own way, come to feel like home and which have since been transformed into hostile and unfamiliar spaces.
Ranging in subject from a neurological condition to the politics of housing and the entwined ecological, indigenous and regulatory histories of Los Angeles, the works used immersive and interactive media including virtual and mixed reality and video game technologies, to make these manifestations of alienation come to be more viscerally experienced, and in some cases, embodied.
More information can be found here.
Open City Documentary Festival, 25-29 April 2024
This exhibition featured five non-fiction works which used moving image practices in the broadest sense of the term to address the sensation of alienation from a domestic environment. These works by Aay Liparoto, Alice Bucknell, Ben Joseph Andrews & Emma Roberts, Nick Smith and Patricia Echeverria Liras allowed viewers to inhabit bodies, relationships and built environments which have, each in their own way, come to feel like home and which have since been transformed into hostile and unfamiliar spaces.
Ranging in subject from a neurological condition to the politics of housing and the entwined ecological, indigenous and regulatory histories of Los Angeles, the works used immersive and interactive media including virtual and mixed reality and video game technologies, to make these manifestations of alienation come to be more viscerally experienced, and in some cases, embodied.
More information can be found here.
