They are using the same language as before.
That’s what the exhibition and its artists impress upon me again and again.
The same vile rhetoric used during the 80s and early 90s AIDS crisis is being weaponised for trans people now. To scare. To shame. To diminish. People’s rights, even the right to exist, are being questioned and scrutinised.
Artistic Director of Shaper/Caper, Tommy Small, described this exhibition as a ‘companion piece’ to his award-winning production Small Town Boys, a show which features 80s and 90s musical anthems and sees a young man from his small hometown seek community in the city’s LGBTQ+ scene – except he’s confronted with the uncaring – even hostile – reaction of the government and public to the unfolding AIDS crisis.
Bury your friends in the morning, protest in the afternoon, dance all night. Joy and tragedy co-exist.
And, wherever this show toured, audience stories poured forth in response. To capture this momentum, Shaper/Caper put a call out to artists to take these stories and foreground them with an artistic response. As part of this bursary programme, the ten selected artists received training from OurStory Scotland to enrich their abilities to interview and capture oral history.
Each of the ten final pieces come back to these core ideas of concealment, connection, and rhetoric – and the parallels echoing from the past to the present.
A spectrum of tech was used – one artist had actual tape players to interact with, and pushing down firmly on the clunky buttons to elicit a voice, tales direct from the speakers to my ears, across time and space, immediate and visceral. Lyra Sand’s piece utilises generative data visualisation, mingling and fusing field recordings and oral history interviews to weave an ever-evolving and dynamic film that will adapt and grow as more recordings are added to the code. Both deal with this importance and distortion of narratives and language in our remembrances of queer experiences.
Alex Hayward’s piece of pencil, crayon, and emulsion is one of the most visually arresting pieces. An adonis of a man is sketched as a statue atop his own tomb – you might have seen this style before, where a smooth-cold effigy of the person buried below is affixed to the lid of the coffin. In this piece, the tomb is cut open for us, like a cross-section, and we see the skeleton underneath, draped with delicate ribbons, one across the forehead, as if they are still suffering tortuous fever. The two versions of the man – peak physical perfection ready for fighting and dancing, versus bones with no flesh – startlingly convey the romanticised and politicised male body, in life and in death.
Let’s Go Fishing by Fiona Percy appears simple on first glance – a khaki-coloured canvas satchel. Open the satchel, and inside are several books wrapped in brown paper. Pick them out, and flick through. You will learn about women loving women, knowledge that was denied to the artist growing up. The bag, reminiscent of her one for school and her father’s for fishing, also features a pink triangle, a symbol reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community, made out of feathered fishing lures. During the AIDS crisis, the Conservative government elected to place information about safe sex only in gay publications, missing out magazines commonly consumed by men such as fishing ones, and therefore were not sharing the message with the closeted community, information which would have helped reduce the spread of the disease.
The exhibition, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, is one of the many creative endeavours from Shaper/Caper, a dance company and charity that magnify and explore the queer experience. And they have just been awarded multi-year funding from Creative Scotland! Look out for this exhibition being toured elsewhere, and more impactful projects from this important organisation.
