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 (but 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. Intervening in commemorative genres of image making—including portraiture and documentary—through performative acts, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging, these works produce and problematize queer forms of kinship. The exhibition reflects on the ability of film and video to disrupt processes of both memorialization and erasure, foregrounding instead the multivalent meanings and affective charge created by resonant combinations of image, sound, and text. The body is addressed and implicated across a number of works, which consider the legacies and lived experiences of illness that have catalyzed communities of care and networks of solidarity, especially among marginalized groups. Departing from the preoccupation with visibility and publicness across politics of identity and representation, these works demonstrate the potential of anachronistic gestures, formal affinities, and archival adjacencies in reframing relationships between artists and their chosen ancestors.
