regard, accommodates a pointing outward—to figures, places, narratives, and experiences whose representations are consciously constructed and immersively presented through its easy manipulation of time, space, sound, and environment. Drawn from the Akeroyd Collection, Homage: Queer lineages on video presents works by seven contemporary artists who use moving images to pay tribute to cultural figures and histories that have been formative, if often (though not always) overlooked. The works in the exhibition, all made over the last two decades, explore how lens and time-based media have enabled artists to articulate desiring and melancholic modes of relationality across generations. Seeking a paradigm for such relationships brings to mind the “politics of friendship,” theorized by the postcolonial scholar Leela Gandhi in the context of metropolitan anticolonial thought and unexpected solidarities. Gandhi reads “friendship,” after Derrida, as an unscripted relation offering the possibility of a community apart from “established affective formations (of family, fraternity, genealogy, filiation)” and a politics that is improvisational, hospitable, communicative, and ultimately radical. 2 The works in this exhibition evince such non-filiative—indeed queer— connections, as artist engagements produce novel forms of kinship and commentary. The titular “queer lineages” are manifest in all their diversity across these artworks, each of which enacts forms of adoration, care, closure, and criticality in relationship to an elected antecedent. “Kinship needs form,” write Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman in their essay, “Kincoherence/Kin-Aesthetics/Kinematics,” introducing the edited volume, Queer Kinship:
Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, 2 Leela Gandhi, e (Duk and the Politics of Friendship Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, 19. , 2006), University Press
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