Gender : Blurred

Gender : Blurred
Camilo Barboza-Soto, Venezuela
Charles-Henry Bédué, France
Paola Bragado, Spain (in collaboration with Salón Silicón)
Jesús León, México
Adolfo Pérez Butrón, México
Stuart Sandford, UK
Eloy Valtierra, México
Yvonne Venegas, México
Diego Torres-Cano, Mexico (special guest)

In the film At home directed by Gus Van Sant & Alessandro Michele for Gucci in 2020, the philosopher Paul B. Preciado appears on the scene inside a television. His character, reminiscent of Orwell's Big Brother, speaks directly to the starring character: the actress Silvia Calderoni:

The sexual difference was invented as an anatomical fiction in the 16th century... and the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality, barely in 1860... We have been built throughout patriarchal history as monsters, madmen, degenerates, hysterical women, deviant, disabled, sicks, mentals… now the monsters take the floor.

Preciado and Calderoni, at the time, walked the current path of gender dysphoria. After elaborated medical and legal procedures, transitioned. Preciado refers that limiting gender to the strictly binary —as something only and totally male or female— for the human is false, inaccurate and insufficient.

Artists who, beyond their position or identity, have risked for decades to show the reality of sexual diversity, and their dissidences, have built the foundations of a freer present, conquering rights that democratic societies enjoy as a whole, taking them for granted.

The exhibition Gender : Blurred brings together a collection of works that explore the notion of gender from the photographic perspective. From different angles, formats and times, the dynamism of a term that resists the static is confirmed.

Yvonne Venegas, refers to her self-portraits from the series The Pencil of Nature, winner of the Casa Cuervo-Zona Maco 2020 award:

Posing, becoming aware of the body and recognizing its meaning allows us to create a record of our own person and, with it, occupy and affirm our role... The pose is the embodiment of a set of values, aspirations and ideals that are closely related with the construction of gender and the expectations of how it should be represented... The androgynous is unclassifiable, it is rebellious, it is alternate, it is fluid and it offers us the possibility of having a different conversation about the interpretation of the masculine - feminine...

Los Revolucionarios by Adolfo Perez Butrón, author of the most iconic Mexican fashion editorials and portraits of the ultimate national celebrities, challenge conceptions of race, identity and gender with an artistic freedom always to be defended. His staged photography —pioneering in Latin America in style and content— reminds us of the repression of disciplinary society against all that is diverse. The work that was originally exhibited at the Museum of Mexico City for the exhibition La redada de los 41 (2001), has not lost its scandalous quality.

The images by Charles-Henry Bédué, published in the Centro de la Imagen’s Luna Córnea new era magazine, 2023, are made with an A.I. program, which uses as a bank his own photographs commissioned by L’Opéra National de Paris in 2019 and those he has taken since 2021 documenting the wild Mexican nightlife. Henry notes: In my ecstatic flesh, two intelligences connect and unite in images The result is theatrical vignettes with a gothic atmosphere, the mise-en-scène of our drives, guilt and pride. 

Camilo Barboza-Soto, nominated for the 2024 Scholarship and Commission Program of the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation, Miami, observes in his diptych a past where gay was a taboo, which was accessed only in code. The images were fixed, the messages: hinted, the behaviors: prohibited, the desire: unstoppable. His polaroids evoke stills from porn, as a representation of an indecipherable organic matter that invites us to discover it as a body.

In the words of Olga Rodríguez, founder of Salon Silicón, the unclassifiable works of the Spanish artist Paola Bragado: revolve around the study of women; the majority migrants, dedicated to popular dance and to the night, strongly oriented to a ‘masculine’ public. Her works show traditional Mexican embroideries on one side, associated with the ‘feminine’ that draw abstract forms on the other side over those vividly portrayed.

The work of Jesús León was published in the commemorative program of L'Opéra National de Paris for Salomé, Saison 22/23 and in the special edition Mexico City of aperture magazine NY in which Daniel Saldaña París points out: the artist rummages through remnants, like a crime reporter who reconstructs the scene of the murder or an anthropologist who imagines a strange civilization based on its remains. There is plenty of film-noir in his gaze, and a great amount of Catholic aesthetics, as well: his portraits are full of Saint Teresitas in alcoholic ecstasy and Saint Sebastian martyred by the glorious arrow of cocaine.

The cruising trails in Puerto Vallarta and in C.U. (UNAM) photographed by Stuart Sandford, artistic resident Tom of Finland Foundation, L.A. realizes the human need for pleasure beyond reproduction or bonding. The images are accompanied by sleek collages of fragmented Polaroids, like the encounters and the possibilities of accessing the impenetrable contemporary individuality.

Documentary photography artist Eloy Valtierra, academic, promoter, and photography researcher, has covered decades of news events, including the historic early 1980s Gay Pride marches in Mexico, which were not a party-heavy tourist experience like in the present. On the contrary, his assistants risked freedom, life and honor to defend the simple right to exist.

Diego Torres-Cano, special guest, presents his jewelry collection: Erupcion, which reflects on different moments of desire in fourteen pieces of silver.

This exhibition as a whole celebrates sexual dissidence, as a form of freedom on the edge, in which everything is risked. Foucault wrote in 1983, 40 years ago, in Friendship as a way of life:

A queer militancy could be less concerned with discovering what we are, but with producing a new way of living, a new gay asceticism. Ways that are not instituted, that go beyond friendship, marriage or the adoption of children or parents. They are unprecedented ways in which heterosexuals are invited to explore and unfold in all their possibilities.

Arturo Delgado, ALMANAQUE-fotográfica. 

June 2023