Performance for the Camera: Queerer than the Sum of its Parts

During their digital residency produced in partnership with Art Volt, naveed L. salek nejad went on an “anal tour” through Esse’s archives in search of Canadian trans and gender-non-conforming artists who enact their identities through performances for the camera, a hybrid medium that offers a subversive strategy for realizing gender beyond the binary.

The entrance to the The Inverted Museum (2020) at the 11th Berlin Biennale was quite intriguing: through the back door. The mediation team embraced the theme by organizing the campiest activity possible, titled The Anal Tour. More than entering through the back, the two guides provided an “elegantly bitchy conversational counter-narrative tour,” deconstructing central norms in the process. “What makes an artwork queer? How can we experience art from a trans-feminist perspective?”1 1  - “Focus Tour: The Anal Tour,” 11th Berlin Biennale, accessible online.

Entering through the back door takes away any straightforward approach to meaning-making. We begin to question our expectations and, thus, which norms dictate how we relate to and interpret art, shaping which histories are deemed canonical and memorable. These norms, like the rest of mainstream society, are mostly hetero-temporal; linear, predetermined, and gendered. Why can’t one laugh out loud? Why are so many exhibitions designed according to the logic of the average life of a heterosexual married couple? Why aren’t narratives more like our intestines: dark, symbiotic, slippery-when-wet, meandering, a source of ecstatic pleasure, and “queerly decadent?”² 2 - Julia Skelly, “Queer Decadence and Decadent Ecologies in Laurence Philomène’s Photography,” Esse arts + opinions, no. 106 (2022), p. 82-85, accessible online.