Feminism, Grief, and Politics: The Mosquito is Dead by Hannah Höch 

Hannah Höch. The Mosquito is Dead. 1922. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photography by Robert LaPrelle, Kimbell Art Museum.

By Alexandra Hulsey 

Did you know that all mosquitoes that bite are female? It feels unfair. Something so annoying, invasive, and evil… shouldn’t be a woman. We wouldn’t bite, rage, and feed off blood like that—unless we had a reason. But even then, well-earned. 

Hannah Höch painted The Mosquito is Dead in 1922, right in the murky middle between World War I and World War II. It’s a strange, uncanny painting—surreal, uncomfortable, poking at something it never fully names. Höch made it after her breakup with Raoul Hausmann, a fellow Dadaist and, frankly, a classic early-20th-century art-world misogynist. So naturally, people interpret the work as a breakup painting. 

Is the mosquito him? A bloodsucking, lingering nuisance finally dealt with? Or is it her? 

Here’s why I question it: the mosquito isn’t squashed. It’s not a splatter on a wall, not a curled-up carcass stuck to someone’s ankle. It’s laid out, stomach-down, all legs intact, splayed gently like a pinned specimen or a creature that simply… stopped. In real life, mosquitoes often don’t die of natural causes. We end them. They get slapped, swatted, smeared. So, how did this one die? Did it starve? Fall from the air? Give up? 

While I’ve never been a mosquito’s first choice, I’ve still been bitten by them in my past. I know what it’s like to be drained, to carry the echoes of something that ended badly. The Mosquito is Dead feels like a soft allude to that: something dead but not resolved. A kind of quiet violence. A grief that hums instead of screams. Not unlike the undercurrent of the rise of fascism and, in turn, the Second World War. 

To the left of the mosquito sits an hourglass—but it’s doing something bizarre. Sand fills the top half, while the bottom curves into a downward concave shape. There, Höch suggests a faint sense of movement with a delicate, wispy brushstroke. Gravity has gone off-script. The sand clings to the sides like glue, dripping with eerie slowness. It makes me think of how time feels after trauma: suspended, disobedient, looping. Höch’s hourglass doesn’t measure time—it resists it. It longs to undo something. To rewind.

At the center stands a small, jointed figure. It resembles a drawing mannequin, but the longer you look, the less certain that becomes. It’s standing stiffly on a pedestal atop a circular base, its limbs angular and awkward: one leg steps forward, its torso twists to face us, and its head tilts at a sharp angle. One arm is bent behind its back; the other might be raised or abstracted entirely. It’s as if the body is trying to perform something expected of it, but doesn’t quite know how. Maybe the mannequin is a stand-in for how women are expected to perform, contort, and behave under pressure. Stiff but delicate. Controlled. 

The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world.

To the right of the mannequin, a bare tree juts up, its few branches impaling three large leaves. To the left, a thin black flag hangs on a tall pole. The tree doesn’t offer shelter or growth—it feels surgical and barren. The black flag isn’t waving. It’s more of a quiet signal of grief, or warning, or resignation. 

This is where Höch’s genius hits hardest. The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world. The personal and the political fold into one another. The painting doesn’t solely depict ‘loss’, it distorts the very tools we use to measure and explain it. Time, posture, symbols—all slightly off. 

Höch’s mosquito might be more than just a bug: Maybe it’s her ex, maybe it’s the patriarchy, maybe it’s history itself. All I know is she lets it die its own death. She leaves it whole. And that feels important. 

Höch was later included in the Nazis’ 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, where her work was mocked as immoral, un-German, and dangerous. And yet—she kept making it. She kept pointing out how gender, war, and nationalism are tangled in the same systems of control. Her art was never safe. It was never meant to be. 

The Mosquito is Dead doesn’t yell. It murmurs. It lingers. It’s grief that won’t resolve, wounds that refuse to close. It’s about endings that don’t truly end. And that rings timely and true now. 

The Mosquito is Dead is currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910–1945, an exhibition that traces how German artists responded to one of the most volatile eras in modern history. The show runs through June 22, 2025.

Cycles of Longing: In Conversation with Rima Sater and Laura Acosta

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Interview by Adi Berardini

“Can you ever fall short when you’re longing?” the voice echoes in the expanded film You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion on view at Forest City Gallery by Rima Sater, a Lebanese-Canadian artist based in London, ON, and Laura Acosta, a Colombian-Canadian artist based in Montreal, Quebec.

While I view the film projected onto the floor with a water tank placed overtop, I feel like I’m peering down over a cliff ledge with midnight blue water surrounding me. As the artists describe, the film is what they’ve coined a piece of troppy sci-fi, with a nostalgic yet futuristic feel; the tropical landscape is often superimposed on the figure so that they become a chameleon to their surroundings. The film looks at feelings of alienation and invisibility, diasporic longing for a place, and the bittersweetness that is inherent in this experience. You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion also explores the maternal and intergenerational trauma of displacement, a topic that echoes deeply at a time when over 1.5 million Palestinians are facing forced displacement from Gaza and a genocide by Israeli forces.

“No matter how displaced you feel someone is feeling similarly,” the voice in the film rings, at times distorted, with the type of ‘70s music you may hear in an infomercial. Desire is multi-faceted, not solely reserved for a person, but for a place, for a home. As the narrator also states, “There is no pain that lasts a hundred years or a body that can sustain it.” 

In this interview, Rima Sater and Laura Acosta discuss their collaboration, the process of working on the film and exhibition You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion, and the accompanying writing workshop. 

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

What first brought you together to collaborate on this film and exhibition?

Rima: Laura and I have been friends for a very long time, and we first collaborated in 2015.

She was doing a residency at the FOFA Gallery at Concordia and invited me. Long story short, we did this other residency together and we had a sound and performance piece that was about this character that we made up named Iris Breeze. It had a lot of big philosophical questions about this woman daydreaming and similar themes to what we had introduced into this piece as well. I got into this residency in Brazil, and then reached out to Laura and asked if she wanted to come. Then we ended up going together, and it just happened. I [figured] I’d bring some film, and Laura brought some textiles and costuming. We both had things we’d been writing about and wanted to use for something. It came together organically and became this film piece. 

And then it wasn’t until we [thought that] maybe we should apply for a show that we figured out how to put it all together. It made sense. Everything just fit together and fell into place so naturally.

Laura: I think Rima and I have an overlapping interest in creating this surreal world out of real life, which is this tendency to want to daydream and have escapist fantasies. I think we both have a similar way that we deal with pain or anxiety, which is through absurdity and humour.

Our friendship is based on this ongoing banter where an image will get so absurd to the point where it’s like just a completely different world from real-life experiences. In our close friendship and being two brown women who grew up with immigrant parents, we have such a similar upbringing and similar experiences of alienation that humor is a way for us to explore all of this through absurdity is where our work overlaps. Even that first collaboration that we did together [had] this tropical feeling. Like how to go on vacation, escapism, and creating grandiose ways of thinking of how to live this tropical luxury life while demonstrating this sort of dissatisfaction with reality, flipping it on its head and making it our own through humor and surrealism.

Rima: A lot of our conversations when we’re together or apart, you could take any of it and turn it into a script. Nothing that we wrote was inauthentic to the things that we were feeling or what we’d say to each other. It’s almost like transcribing a text thread between the two of us. It would be how we make these connections and play on words. We have this kind of like téte a téte thing where one of us says one thing, and then the other person makes a joke out of it based on one word from that thing. Then it just evolves, but it always comes full circle in the end. It’s funny and ridiculous but rooted in sorrow.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

The film explores themes of belonging and alienation of foreign bodies referencing sci-fi. Can you speak further about the meaning and inspiration for the film?

Laura: At the time, for some reason, I remember we were at the Covent Garden Market, and we were talking about our mothers and this idea of how there’s this normalized sense of suffering that they have. And that’s where the Arabic saying came about that Rima brought up, “You can’t have honey without an onion.”

Rima: My mom said it one day to me in Arabic very loosely. And I was like, I love that. In Arabic, there are a lot of idioms, but they also play on words of each other and there’s a lot of rhyming. It’s these little cheeky things that I’ve been learning as I grow up as well. And that one just stood out to me so much because it’s so simple. It’s just like, yeah, you can’t have honey without an onion. It makes so much sense.

Our relationship to this matriarchal pain comes through with just being inherently born in the cultures that we’re born in and being women.

Laura: And then there’s the counterpart to it from Colombia that was, “There’s no pain that lasts a hundred years or a body that can sustain it.”

We’re thinking about these sayings a lot and this idea of maternal lineages. And I think we were almost talking about how we have this sorrow that isn’t ours sometimes. Like we were just kind of born with it. Our relationship to this matriarchal pain comes through with just being inherently born in the cultures that we’re born in and being women.

That unfolded into a larger theme of alienation because that’s our situated knowledge, but we want to make work that appeals to all types of experiences. Under the system that we live in, we’re all living with alienation. We’re all so separated and not comfortable with who we are, it’s not made for people like us to be comfortable.

Laura: Then Rima had this residency in Brazil lined up and she invited me to it, and at the time I was playing with sort of reflective textiles, and so we thought, okay, why don’t we speak about the idea of visibility, belonging [and] not belonging, through a visual sort of story, and then obviously, Rima has all the knowledge of capturing image with different formats, so it became a play on where to put these bodies inside these landscapes.

We went to an island in Brazil, so it was all very tropical, in line with what we were talking about before. And then it became this conversation about what bodies are visible, what bodies are invisible, and what it inherently means to be human, to feel alienated without even knowing what you’re alienated from.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Rima: And I think just the word alien lends to the sci-fi theme as well. Sci-fi [films] are so absurd but also incredible since they predict a lot of things. There are so many movies that have predicted certain technologies, so they’re also very modern at the same time as being this sort of strange, otherworldly thing.

We coined a term, “Troppy sci-fi,” which was the genre we decided to put this film under, and with our work in general, it made sense with what we were doing. It had a bit of this otherworldly sort of aspect to it. I think that when we were writing our parts, and we collaborated and put them together, with self-reflection as well, [we thought] where did these emotions come from? Where do these things stem from? 

And not to be psychoanalytical, but also just thinking maybe this happened when I was a kid, or this is what I learned, or thinking about things that your parents had gone through and maybe how that imprinted on you and led [and influenced] your experiences and the way that you react to stuff.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Your exhibit is very immersive and references water with the dark blue walls, lighting, and water tank over the film screening. Can you speak more about the symbol of water? It lends itself well to tropical sci-fi, having the water over the film too. Was it difficult logistically? 

Rima: It’s the simplest of all the ideas that we had. We really wanted to honor the water because we were on an island, and we were just surrounded by water and there were waterfalls everywhere.

It was just like a very symbolic element to our experience at the residency, so we wanted to make sure that it was part of the piece as well. We were like, “Oh, maybe we’ll do a waterfall wall,” we just had all these ideas. And then one day, I was home, and we were like, “What about like a pool?”

And we [thought] “This is great. Let’s do a pool.” So, she came over and we went into my bathtub and filled it up and took my projector and made sure that it made sense. So then from there, we had this box fabricated and waterproofed when we were in Halifax. And it was so simple otherwise, but so effective. It translates into the film and how there are different perspectives within itself, as well as how people can view the content.

Laura: The water is meant to represent many things, but more and more the piece feels like this daydream that we’ve been trying to describe, even from our first piece with Iris Breeze, this feeling of being so inside your head.

Having everything blue and with water lights and an underwater feeling, I equate it with the subconscious. Even as we’re talking now, it’s making me reflect on our friendship and the importance of female friendships is how much therapy you give to each other, it’s unbelievable. It is like full therapy sessions where your one experience can be dissected into everything your family represents, your entire experience of who you are.

I think more and more about this piece, and the text that Sandi Rankaduwa wrote, which is a gorgeous piece of writing. It took me more to this place that it’s not meant to be an outdoor place, it feels like being inside a daydream or a subconscious state.

Rima: At the Khyber, we both visualized it as being its own thing that you could immerse yourself in and get lost in it too because you have the lights reflecting all around you that emulate the water and then the water within itself. But being there, it was also trying to make it like this calming and reflective experience at the same time, as well as addressing these heavier topics. A lot of people have seen the piece and been like, I feel like I just went through a therapy session, reflecting on their own experiences with the themes that we had.

So having it at FCG (Forest City Gallery) and having it in this very perfect little box, gives it more of that feeling of “I’m in here. I have to be with this, and I have to be with myself, and I have to be with my thoughts.” The more we do it, or the more time that passes, different things stand out. It’s amazing how it’s evolved.

Installation view of Rima Sater & Laura Acosta, You Can’t Have Honey Without An Onion, 2024. Photography by Rachel Long / Saros Creative.

Can you speak more about the writing workshop and what inspired you to do a workshop as well?

Laura: The workshop came about because the Khyber was interested in community engagement. Shout out to the Khyber, they’re doing cool stuff over there and making sure that the community is reflected in what’s happening inside the space and it’s part of everything that’s happening in the space.

They [asked how we would want] to do a community engagement exercise. And we started talking about the process that we have towards creating our work, which starts with this conversation, a banter, and then this production of a score in a way. And that score becomes the starting point for images or for movement or whatever we come up with.

Then we came up with fun exercises for a group of people to write a story together. We also didn’t know what the outcome of that was going to be, which was cool because you get people’s prompts and then see how people explore their personal experiences, but through a playful way and in a group setting.

Rima: The prompts [encourage] you to reflect on your experiences with the themes of alienation, belonging, and grief, anything we cover in our work, then write down a sentence, a word, just anything that comes to mind. Then we just rip it all up and put it into a little hat or bucket anonymously. And then from there, you pick stuff out like this Mad Libs game. 

When we did the workshop this time around, because we had two separate groups, we noticed that both of us had done it a little bit differently but still stuck within the same theme. For example, we did like the who, what, where, when, why, and sometimes how. You’d pick something out and then ask everybody, “Where do you think this fits in?” [From there] you write that down and then have everyone describe that and elaborate on it a little bit more. Then we differentiate between sound bite and narration and eventually turn it into something that could be a script.

Everyone loves it because it’s collaborative and writing can be so personal. Even though people were writing very personal things, deconstructing it in a way that was a bit absurd or silly but also very profound, allowed people to enjoy it more and see the different ways in which writing can take forms.

Laura: That’s the beautiful thing about collaboration. When it’s non-hierarchical, there’s no leader. Then you slowly start seeing what role each person takes. Some people speak more, other people like to take a moment and say something when they feel it’s right. And then as the story starts unfolding, you can see it start turning on in their heads, and they start creating more stuff. It’s a cool experience because also we never know what’s going to come out of it.  

You Can’t Have Honey Without an Onion was on view at Forest City Gallery from January 6th to February 17th, 2024.

Velvet Terrorism: A Story by Pussy Riot’s Russia

Punk Prayer, Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, 2012, courtesy of the artists.

November 24th to January 29th, 2023

Kling&Bang

By Irene Bernardi

Velvet Terrorism is the first exhibition by the Russian feminist performance art group Pussy Riot. The exhibition at Kling&Bang in Reykjavik, Iceland is curated by Dorothee Kirch, Ragnars Kjartanssonar, and Ingibjargar Sigurjónsdóttur. Velvet Terrorism narrates the history of Russian totalitarianism through the memories of Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, a founding member of the group since its first performance back in 2011. With their mix of music, art, and rebellion, Pussy Riot became an icon of the opposition against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oppressive policies from his second election in 2012 to the Ukraine War in 2022. 

Velvet Terrorism – Pussy Riot’s Russia, Kling&Bang, Installation view, photo by Irene Bernardi.

The exhibition displays itself as a massive punk-rock journal, full of pictures, writings, colorful duct tape, and video installations. In a sparkling font, the exhibit’s title opens the door to the first video, an original work by Icelandic artist and curator Ragnars Kjartanssonar. The artist films a group member while she urinates over a blowup of Putin. Her face is hidden under the iconic ski mask, the eyes are focused on the camera with an unmoved and resolute look. This act of defiance ends with the performer kicking Putin’s picture, which falls on the ground surrounded by splashes of urine. 

Velvet Terrorism – Pussy Riot’s Russia, Kling&Bang, Installation view, photo by Irene Bernardi.

Kjartanssonar’s work welcomes the audience, who gets thrown into a creative chaos of pictures and screens that saturates the room up to the ceiling. The art pieces chronologically tell the story of Pussy Riot. Not only does it show their actions and performances, but it reports the media’s lies about the arrest of Masha and Lucy Shtein – an activist and Masha’s partner – following the 2012 performance of the song Punk Prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Masha paid for this performance with a two-year sentence in a penal colony in the Ural Mountains, more than 1000 km away from Moscow. The performance also gives the exhibition its title, since “Velvet Terrorism” is the moniker that Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, considered to be Vladimir Putin’s spiritual confidant, used to address it. 

Policeman enters the Game, Moscow’s Final World Cup, 2018, courtesy of the artists.

Once Alyokhina and Shtein were released, protests and performances didn’t stop—on display the visitors can see the most iconic performances like Policemen Enters the Game, when activists demanded the stop of police abuses and the release of every political prisoner by invading the playing field during the World Cup final in 2018. Another one is the “homage” paid to President Putin for his sixty-eighth birthday when Pussy Riot placed rainbow flags over five government buildings in Moscow. Many other actions and demonstrations led Alyokhina to serve house arrest until April 2022. In protest of the declaration of war against Ukraine, Masha cut off her electronic wristband. This demonstration cost her a new sentence for having broken the terms of probation which started in to which she was obliged September 2021. 

Rainbow flags, Moscow’s Culture Ministry building, 2020, courtesy of the artists.

In the last room of the exhibition, two videos ironically show the ankle guards as if they were in the window of a jewelry store. The exhibition seems to end there, until a security guard tells the visitors they need to leave their belongings and proceed through a cramped little room where the Russian national anthem is played at full volume. 

Once the visitor leaves this temporary prison, they return to the exhibition’s entrance by going through a tunnel where pictures and videos of the latest Pussy Riot performances are shown all over the walls. At the entrance, the visitor learns about the presence of many surveillance cameras all over the exhibition, a clear allusion to the oppressive media encirclement in Putin’s regime. 

The exhibition, which launched on November 24th and will last until January 29th, 2023, originated from the collaboration between Ragnars Kjartanssonar and Maria Alyokhina. The artist helped the activist leave Russia after her latest sentence and Alyokhina started a European tour with the Pussy Riot members to promote her book Riot Days, published in 2017.

Velvet Terrorism is undoubtedly a complex retrospective. It aims to show the group’s strength and its desire to emerge and state the truth. The exhibition uses an irreverent punk attitude by turning the objects that characterize a violent dictatorship into artistic subjects. Whether it is a prison, a whip, a surveillance camera, or a Putin image, Pussy Riot can use it to mock the regime and regain power and freedom in their hands. 

Check out Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia at Kling&Bang in Reykjavík, now extended until January 29th, 2023.

Sweet Decay: in and as an ecosystem by Shannon Taylor-Jones

Shannon Taylor-Jones, in and as an ecosystem exhibition installation. Photos by Shannon Taylor-Jones, courtesy of the artist.

Shannon Taylor-Jones

Good Sport Gallery

September 23 – October 22, 2022

By Reilly Knowles

Shannon Taylor-Jones has transformed the gallery into a tender, ghostly woodland.

Crossing the threshold of Good Sport Art Gallery & Studio in London, Ontario, I’m beckoned inside the space by mossy nets of knitting. At first, the woolen sculptures hanging from the ceiling evoke decaying flora, but as I draw close, figures reveal themselves: plush blobs like decomposing faces with stretched sockets, then intestinal snakes of bubble-gum pink. Their bodies are reclaimed by the forest, pleading for careful touches – indeed, gentle interaction is encouraged by the artist. Each sculpture feels painstakingly placed and distinct, disallowing the installation from truly feeling ‘wild,’ yet each one flows in and out of the other, like one lyric leading to the next.

Shannon Taylor-Jones, in and as an ecosystem exhibition installation. Photos by Shannon Taylor-Jones, courtesy of the artist.

Tucked inside and hanging from the textiles are specimens of crusted fungi and crispy leaves, chosen as carefully as jewels for their unique colours and shapes. Amidst the textiles are also oil paintings on panel, which appear like beetroot and rotted spinach smeared across lumber. The paintings are far stronger when intermixed with the textiles, and the span of wall dedicated to three panels feels quiet in proximity to its richer surroundings. Beneath the central corner of the installation is a blanket with three knitted pillows for visitors to rest and contemplate.

Taylor-Jones is an emerging interdisciplinary artist working in Toronto and London and has been a member of Good Sport (a collective as well as a gallery and studio space) since 2018.1 She explores decay and mycology as a way of thinking through the human body’s place in its ecosystem and its relationship to mortality. Her work is a way of affirming every organism’s tethers to the whole of nature, and every organism’s experience of the eternal tides of making and unmaking.2 As she writes in the exhibition’s accompanying text: “Corporeality is haunted by intimate kinship. That which is ‘human’ is not separate from ‘nature,’ but is deeply, intrinsically embedded within it. Art making is not an individual act, but a fertile collaboration of life, death, and the inbetween.”3

Shannon Taylor-Jones, in and as an ecosystem exhibition installation. Photos by Shannon Taylor-Jones, courtesy of the artist.

Taylor-Jones especially sees an affinity between the messiness of nature and the messiness of being disabled. That is to say, the messiness of being a body that is idiosyncratic beyond social acceptance, of being a body that feels both intense joy and intense pain. As she writes: “The intersection of disability/neurodivergence/madness is a liminal place of being, an ecosystem of simultaneous, disparate truths, where growth and decay both thrive.”3 She views the planet itself as disabled, its systems disjointed by climate change. In the face of surviving on this disabled globe, she contends: “people who live in disabled bodies are the people to look to for how to live and build on a disabled planet… To live on this planet, we need to think differently, and I think we need to think about the interconnection of all life (and death), and we need to recognize non-human beings as important, as equal, as intelligent.”5

Shannon Taylor-Jones, in and as an ecosystem detail. Photos by Shannon Taylor-Jones, courtesy of the artist.

The softness and slowness of the installation feels poignant at a point in the pandemic when people have long since been ordered to throw down their joyful, soft pursuits and return to their jobs per usual, to once more submit to the oppressive capitalist grind. As a person with severe chronic fatigue, Taylor-Jones critiques the notion that people must always be productive, as well as hypocritical discourse within disability activist spaces that often shames people for ‘not doing enough.’6

Amidst this onslaught, her exhibition beckons: ‘Come, rest awhile. Rest inside the coming and the going. Everything is not well, but it’s beautiful in any case. Sit inside my uneasy loveliness.’

in and as an ecosystem continues until October 22nd, 2022 at Good Sport Art Gallery & Studio (402.5 Richmond St., London, Ontario). The gallery is open Saturdays 12 – 4 pm, or by appointment. This exhibition review was written for Ruth Skinner’s course The Greatest Shows on Earth at Western University.

1 “Shannon Taylor-Jones,” Good Sport, Good Sport Art Gallery & Studio. Accessed September 26, 2022. https://www.good-sport.ca/shannon-taylor-jones.

2 Correspondence with the artist.

3 Shannon Taylor-Jones, “in and as an ecosystem,” Good Sport, Good Sport Art Gallery & Studio. Accessed September 26, 2022. https://www.good-sport.ca/current.

4 Ibid.

5 Correspondence with the artist.

6 Ibid.

Talking ‘Fred: An Unbecoming Woman’ with Annie Krabbenschmidt

Annie Krabbenschmidt author photo, courtesy of the author.

Interview by Adi Berardini

The book Fred: An Unbecoming Woman by Annie Krabbenschmidt came into my life when I truly needed to read it. It didn’t take long before I began underlining passages of the book with a bright blue pen as if it was the guidebook for the slightly nerdy queer. I had never read a book that I could relate to on so many levels—I felt like the book put my experience of queerness into such relatable passages. I suddenly felt less alone while looking back at my coming-of-age story.

Fred: An Unbecoming Woman highlights what it feels like to “fail” womanhood with perfectionist tendencies and made me both laugh out loud and tear up at moments.  Krabbenschmidt traces the lineage of their journey coming out often using 2000s pop culture references, including Booksmart, Twilight, and Mean Girls. Fred highlights the importance of moving through fear and anxiety to arrive at self-love and acceptance.

Originally from the California Bay Area and a Duke University graduate, Annie Krabbenschmidt is a writer and artist currently based in Los Angeles. A natural storyteller, they have done stand-up comedy, improv, written op-eds, and hosted the podcast, “Love is a Softball Field.” The following is an interview with Krabbenschmidt about autotheory, humour and pop culture in writing, and how their debut book came to be.

There were many parts of your coming out experience that you detailed that I could relate to, which felt healing. From how you cherished your close friendships growing up to being unable to come out at first because of the anxiety. Can you speak more about how autotheory lends itself well to sharing these experiences? Can you explain your process of writing Fred?

I remember distinctly taking a journalism class when I was [17 or 18] and thinking that I was missing journalism. I was writing a long time ago before the book came into existence. I [thought that] maybe I’m missing journalism because I know that one of the beauties of journalism is talking about what’s going on and saying something that matters to people and it’s relevant. That relevancy was something I was trying to work into my writing.

I had these two teachers who were like, “Well, we don’t think first-person narratives should exist anymore. It’s over. Hunter S. Thompson already did it.” And I felt so frustrated listening to that. I think that it’s so silly to say something is over first of all, but I also feel like autotheory is like the genre of the underrepresented because who’s going to talk about us except ourselves? I am a little bit bitter that that was the take they took, [thinking that] no one wants to read it anymore. I think we’re just experiencing this kind of revolution of reading these stories.

I’m thinking of writers like Nikole Hannah-Jones, who wrote about choosing a school for her daughter in New York and seeing how segregation would impact her personally, which is hugely important because she’s an upper-middle-class to upper-class Black woman, so these choices are so multilayered for her. It’s one of those things where all the writers I looked up to were doing autotheory, whether they called it that or not.  I think we need to place a lot of value on writing that comes from that position and not overlook it.

I’m a big fan of autotheory as a lens to kind of like unearth stories that we need to hear.

If you think about it, we’ve been doing autotheory for the heteronormative and mainstream, whatever you want to call it. Like from the position of power, the white straight man, whoever that person is, whoever that biography is, we’ve kind of been doing that autotheory for a long time. We just haven’t been calling it that. We’ve just been letting it be philosophy, letting it be theory, or letting it be the Declaration of Independence. These have been autotheory without being called that because that’s just what they were.

I’m a big fan of autotheory as a lens to kind of like unearth stories that we need to hear. Carmen Maria Machado is a big influence and as a writer, I look up to her a lot. Her whole thesis in her book In the Dream House is about unearthing the archives. I think that being able to embrace autotheory and not having it be some code word for frivolous or unimportant, I wanted to embrace a personal narrative. I think it’s maybe clear throughout the book, but I have done plenty of academic work and school and research and I’ve read academic texts and enjoyed them. But then I was like, do they apply to me? For this first, big project I am working on I thought let’s write what I know. And I know myself or I will by the time this book is done.

I think autotheory is a way to lend credibility to people who are trying to grapple with their position, especially if they’re in an oppressed position. I think it’s an important avenue for people to—I’m not sure if this is the right word—but claw their way out from under this position. Not because they’re inherently low value, but because they’re being pressed upon. So, I think that it’s a beautiful way to give those identities more attention is to let people speak for themselves. For many reasons, the process of writing Fred [was] a lot of fear.

It must be hard to recount those memories.

I want to reiterate that I think I’ve come out of this as a much more confident and assertive artist. There are many years when I was just gaining the confidence to move forward and write. I read something at a reading night, and someone said, “Would you like to write a book?” And within that one moment of asking, my answer was, “Yes.” It was such an easy way for me to decide that this was something that I want to do. And I think that it’s too bad that I needed to have that question asked of me. But I’ve always been a storyteller, or I don’t know if [I was] specifically a writer in terms of a pen to paper writer, but I’ve always been sharing at family, doing annoying poems that little kids do at gatherings, and I’ve been trying to make the table laugh. I just didn’t know that I was allowed to call myself a writer.

Fred: an Unbecoming Woman by Annie Krabbenschmidt. Published by Radical Queer Dinner Party.

It was moving to me since I’ve never really seen that anxiety depicted around coming out explained in such thorough detail. I felt that I can relate to this, especially coming into my identity a bit later. I was drawn in by how you detailed queer loneliness and sexual repression, especially since these are not often included in the broader narrative of queerness. Can you expand more on why you unpacked these themes in Fred?

I’ve always been plagued by that. I mean, even now 19 was relatively early compared to many of my peers that come out even later than that. For me, I [thought that] if I’m coming out like I’ve seen it on TV, I should be 15. And I should be done when I come out of the closet. But it was so much more of a long journey of confusion, clarity, and shame. I mean, shame was there the whole time, but it was not clear cut until I wrote in the book, like the exact moment I went to college, and I was like, “Oh, duh, of course.” Maybe it was in the back of my head, but it was never clear. One of the reasons I wanted to write the book was that I’ve never read about someone really untying every single fibre of their being and being like, “where did the gay part get in here?”

All of those things that I was grappling with held me back in terms of declaring myself. I felt lonely and I was confused because I had kissed boys and not been attracted or had [feared] physical intimacy with women. I had never seen it before. It was a matter of wanting to make sure this experience was documented, just so that other people can know that shame can be a huge part of coming out and not everyone can come out. I would probably say it’s more rare than people think to come out confident and declaring oneself. I had just never seen it so meticulously turned around and examined in such a way. So, I [thought that] this is a good story just because I’ve never read it.

And people are always kind of coming out, whether it’s for the first time as queer or another time as non-binary or any other way that you might be exploring your identities. It was about six months before finding out that I was going to be writing a book that I owned my identity as a writer and this realization that I was very intimidated by women and sexual activity. I don’t know how else to explain it, except that it’s possible that I’m on this demisexual spectrum. I’m more of an intimate person, a romantic and intimate non-physical person. I’m not interested in one-night stands. And I think more people would [think] you add another sexual identity to yourself and you’re like, “God, there’s just so much to explain,” but I think that’s an actual all-encompassing theme, is explaining yourself. That was a part of my preoccupation was I feel like I need to explain myself over again.

I think I’ve arrived at I am both things, I’m no longer sexually repressed, but I can acknowledge that I was repressed and scared of exhibiting sexuality and exhibiting desires specifically. I think that word is the one really scared me. It was desire and imposing your desires, announcing your desires, and telling people that you have desires—all of that scared me. Now I can acknowledge that I am able to have desires and I can support my own desires.

You incorporate humour in your writing so seamlessly. Can you speak more about your thoughts on humour and writing, especially when discussing more serious and difficult-to-talk-about topics?

I’m going to start by really reversing this question just because I think as opposed to incorporating humor and serious writing, I had to start by trying to incorporate seriousness in humour writing. At one time was a wannabe comic. I started my whole writing dream wanting to be a TV writer. Tina Fey was my big idol and I wanted to do that. I kind of planned on doing that throughout college and was trying to set myself up to go write at a TV show like 30 Rock or SNL or something like that. I started off being quite dedicated to just humour.

And when I was in high school, I used humour as a shield and to keep people at an arm’s length, which is very commonly understood at this point. I think I punched down a lot more and for one thing, I was much more sheltered as a 17-year-old than I am now. I don’t think I was ever mean with that humour, but I was keeping the attention away from me. I was making self-deprecating jokes about myself. I think I used to use humour to avoid honesty, And I think one of the things I’m most proud of in the book is that humour comes around in the most honest moments, like genuine things that I did that I cannot believe. It’s embarrassing, but to not include it so that I could be taken more seriously would feel too serious.

I think I started off being too funny. And then I was like, you know what? I have a lot of feelings and I need people to know this, so then I got serious. And then now I’m kind of blending it in a way that I feel more comfortable with. I think the actual question for me is how challenging it was to incorporate super serious moments in the book. The challenge of writing about self-harm later as not a climax, but it kind of is. For me, it felt like the emotional climax of the book was revealing that I had hurt myself on purpose and acknowledging there’s shame around that. There’s societal shame around that and I had never talked about it even before writing.

I just wanted to touch and not [fear] the things that were the most serious because my biggest fear was that people read this book thinking it was a comedy book. And then being like, “Oh my God, I didn’t expect this.” The reverse is what drove me, like how I can brave being very vulnerable in writing as opposed to hiding behind humour. I think it’s a question of balancing that.

An aspect that stands out in the book is the varying formats including graphs and illustrations, which helped capture my attention as a reader. I also enjoy how you used pop culture to make the book accessible. Can you speak more about how you use pop culture (like Twilight and Booksmart) to tie in your personal experiences?

Like I mentioned, I’m in-between the non-academic world and I’m very much into pop culture. And I also kind of fancy myself an intellectual, even though that is loaded. But I’m glad that I just decided to put that essay on Twilight in because I feel like there’s this meta experience going on, where I want to prove to you that I’m smart, but I’m talking about Twilight.

The joke of that chapter is how much I was lost trying to be intelligent or trying to understand things without really understanding theory or philosophy very well. But a scholar named Jack Halberstam writes about how important it is to understand pop culture. And I couldn’t agree more with that because it is an immediate reflection of what’s going on in our lives. Why wouldn’t it be an artifact that we talk about? I can think about every time I’ve heard someone make a gay joke in a show and how that impacted me. Of course, I need to dissect these things as we’re moving forward.

And I believe in the power of symbolism and symbology, not as in Dan Brown, but the power of words and how they can affect people. And I think that something I wanted to explain to people as soon as I came out was “Hey, these jokes weren’t that funny to me. And here’s why my self-loathing is more severe than your need to crack this joke. Let’s talk about this so we can all be a little more sensitive.” And I think I wanted to tackle all the ways that we get the subliminal messaging through pop culture, because pop culture is the thing that we see all the time. It impacts me and everyone [engaging in it].

Jack Halberstam is the one who can articulate this better, but it’s the subconscious mirror, as opposed to [how] the university attempts to really theorize, pop culture is the more instant, subconscious, immediate response to what’s going on in our lives. I think it’s super important and that ties into my desire to include drawings. Once I had the authority to write a book, which is arguably self-permitted, I was like why wouldn’t I include the drawings? And some people would say, well, [you will be] taken less seriously as a “writer.” But at the same time, I don’t know if I want to be taken seriously as a writer. I won’t be taken seriously as an artist perhaps. And as someone who has things to say, a huge part of me is that I like doodles, and cartoons, and visuals, and I was always a math person. Having graphs made sense to me. And having the musical theater interlude for me, I had to draw a theater scene and acknowledge the fact that a huge part of my sharing experiences was about singing and trying to enjoy all the different ways that we express ourselves.

I think in that same way that pop culture gets overlooked or undermined, a population of writers and scholars doesn’t love the idea of not taking your own books seriously and adding these cartoons in. But for me, trying to undermine the seriousness and preciousness of the writing and the book was a huge, important thing that I’ve only recently been able to embrace. I’ll be silly, and you might think that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I am processing things more than you think I am. I don’t announce it as a theory book, but I do think there’s some theory in it and it’s also accessible. I hope more art gets made that incorporates multi-media because I think we’re all better off for it.

Make sure to check out the book Fred: An Unbecoming Woman by Annie Krabbenschmidt, available on June 3rd, 2022.

Talking to Myself: On the Occult

The Star Card display. Photo courtesy of Emme Lund.

By Emme Lund

In 2015, in the shed behind the Small Press Distribution warehouse in Berkeley, CA, I had a tarot reading with CA Conrad during Halloween weekend. The shed was warm. Christmas lights lined the crease where the walls met the ceiling. The poet’s painted fingernails bent over the edge of the deck, bracelets dangling from their wrists. “What would you like to ask the cards?” they said.

            “I’m stuck. How do I unstick?”

            I’d had a terrible week, month, whole year, actually. My partner and I were moving to Portland, OR in a couple of weeks. When I first moved to Oakland, I thought I would live there forever, eventually dying in the Bay Area, but capitalism ruins all and the tech industry had pushed rents far past what we could afford.

            CA Conrad shuffled the cards, their eyes closed.

            They laid out three cards on the table in front of me. One for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. I don’t remember the exact cards, but I remember the story they told.

            The first card was a jumbled mess, a forest burning to the ground. They tapped the card. “You’ve had a hard time. Your past was difficult.”

            There’s a feeling I get when something rings true for me, a feeling that I’ve chased for much of my life because, for a long time, most things did not ring true. Everything felt wrong, even things that felt right to others. This feeling comes up in my chest, catches in my throat, and a burning finds the backs of my eyes. I have always been quick to tears. I was reckoning with a lot then. My drinking was out of hand. Queerness was bubbling inside of me but right beside it was bubbles of shame. I had been thinking a lot about that feeling of wrongness I’d felt my whole life, the thing that made it so that many things did not ring true.

The Death Card display. Photo Courtesy of Emme Lund.

            They moved on to the next card. Someone walked among the burnt forest, assessing the damage, a card later in the same series. “Here you are now,” they said, “going over your past, understanding how hard it was for you.”

            This rang less true for me. I wasn’t dealing with my past. I was looking to the future, looking for a way to happiness.

I must have made a face, because CA Conrad smiled and then tapped the next card, a star exploding. “This is a very good card,” they said. “In this card, you are surrounded by people who love you. Life feels like a party. This is your future, but you won’t get there until you’ve reckoned with your difficult past and figured out who you are.”

I felt a kinship to these people and so I let them read tarot for me, I looked up my natal chart, and over and over again, I experienced that feeling of something ringing true, a feeling I had not felt in some time.

It took me a long time to find a home in reading tarot and following astrology. I was raised in a devoutly Evangelical Christian home, a household so strict that I was once forbidden from owning anything related to aliens after my grandfather walked in one day and claimed all things outer space to be the work of Satan. My aversion to the occult was based on the false dichotomy that if tarot and astrology were the work of the Devil, the opposite to Christianity, then it was also a religion, the opposite side of the same coin. I didn’t want anything to do with any religion. I’m a queer trans girl who asks questions about everything around her. All I ever heard was that I was either born wrong or choosing a path that led to my own destruction, all in the name of religion.

            I must admit that when I first left Christianity, I swung too hard into the world of logic and reason. I abandoned any search for magic out of fear that I would find myself trapped in another religion. But I quickly found that something deep inside of me wanted me to explore my depths. My gravitation towards the occult grew out of a desire to know myself.

            And some magic cannot be denied.

            In 2005, I met the person who later became my wife. I fell in love. Early on in our relationship, they said something to the tune of, “Magic is simply science we can’t explain yet.” We moved to the Bay Area together and quickly fell in with a crowd of witchy poets, the kind of friends who throw parties where someone is reading tarot in the corner and new acquaintances ask what your sun, moon, and rising sign is as soon as they learn your name.

I felt a kinship to these people and so I let them read tarot for me, I looked up my natal chart, and over and over again, I experienced that feeling of something ringing true, a feeling I had not felt in some time.

The High Priestess Card display. Photo courtesy of Emme Lund.

           

I don’t think astrology or tarot can predict the future.

I believe astrology lays out a blueprint for the kind of person we may become and the challenges we may face within ourselves, but I don’t believe it is absolute nor is it the totality of our person. We are also our genetics and our social status and where we were born and who raised us and so much more. We have been watching the stars for thousands of years and astrology is a collection of our observations.

For me, tarot offers an opportunity to inquire how I feel about something, a chance to convene with my intuition. In 2017, exactly two years after CA Conrad read tarot for me in the shed, I got sober. I don’t think the cards or the stars could predict I would get sober, but I think I knew, deep down, that sobriety was something I wanted and astrology and tarot gave me the power to tell my story in a way that led to sobriety. For humans, stories help us make sense of the world. Astrology and tarot are a way for our intuitions to apply form and structure to the chaos of this life on earth. They lead us to what we want.

If you do A and B, eventually you will find C.

What I like about astrology and tarot, about magic in general, is that it does not care if you believe in it. It is not like the religion of my youth, full of absolutes. A refrain I hear often when I listen to horoscopes or teachings on tarot is “Take what you will and leave the rest.”

Nearly every morning begins with me seated at my altar, lighting a candle, and drawing a card from my tarot deck. In the quietness of the room and the space between my dreams and the emerging day, I can find a stillness that lets me consider what I’m feeling. Some mornings the card I draw feels exciting. Sometimes it is harder for me to understand what a particular card could mean in the context of the day. Often a card will only make sense later when I look back at what I was doing at the time I drew it, when the details of what my intuition was working on become clear.

             When I look back on my life now, it seems inevitable. Like, of course, I would end up here, a sober trans woman who knows herself better than she ever thought possible. I often think about that time in the shed with CA Conrad, when they told me I would not find happiness until I came to terms with my difficult past and got to who I truly was. I don’t know. Maybe my life was inevitable, but really, I can’t help but look back at all those times I’ve shuffled a tarot deck or read about what the stars were doing, trying to apply both to the context of my life. There’s no doubt in my mind that astrology and tarot gave me the space to convene with myself, to speak with my own intuition, and to choose which way I wanted my life to go. But as with all things: Take what you will and leave the rest.

The Boy with a Bird in His Chest by Emme Lund.

Check out Emme Lund’s debut novel, THE BOY WITH A BIRD IN HIS CHEST, out from Atria Books on February 15, 2022.

Talking Death with Sam Moore: All my teachers died of AIDS

All my teachers died of AIDS by Sam Moore. Published by Pilot Press London. 2020.

Interview by Harper Wellman

CW: Death, discussion of transphobia

Sam Moore began their writing career while working toward their Master’s at the University of Oxford in 2017. While exploring various forms, Moore found their style, and success, with poetry and short stories, publishing pieces in Harts and Minds, DASH, Fearsome Critter, and Modern Queer Poets. Moore has developed a cross-genre style of writing that is on display in their book, All my teachers died of AIDS, from Pilot Press. Equal parts academic research, pop culture critique, and personal reflections, All my teachers died of AIDS explores the intersection of queer identity and death, and how the inseparable two inform each other. Below, Moore discusses Teachers, their process, their community, and what’s next. Moore is an editor for Third Way Press and a freelance journalist in London, UK.

Thank you for talking with us Sam. Teachers is a wonderful book that I think many people can relate to. Can you talk about how this project came to be? 

I spent a lot of time writing very traditional prose when I was finishing up my master’s degree – writing the first half of a novel for my thesis, something I keep saying I’ll come back to, and one day I will… but alongside that, I was also reading more and more experimental work, that existed between different styles and literary traditions. It was the first time I was reading Maggie Nelson, and diving into more of Chris Kraus’ work, and I basically ended up wanting to write something more along those lines, something that defied easy categorization. And then I went to a few of the Queers Read This events at the Institute of Contemporary Art here in London, run by Isabel Waidner, and Richard Porter (who runs Pilot, and would go on to publish the book), and was just incredibly struck by the range and strangeness of queer writing; Isabel read from their novel, Dodie Bellamy read from When the Sick Rule the World, Verit Spott read from Prayers, Manifestoes, Bravery, and it was impossible not to just be swept up in the power of this kind of writing, and wanting to contribute to it in one way or another.

Around the time I went to Queers Read This I also found the courage to start going to open mic nights (even after years of graduate workshops, the thought of actually standing up and reading poems out loud to strangers remains terrifying), and to begin with, I was reading lots of more traditional poems – all of which are from a book about bisexuality called Alex(andra), that I wrote between years one and two of my master’s degree and that I’m still hoping to get out into the world (so if anyone’s interested in publishing it, you know where to find me…) but gradually ran out of material and used that as an excuse to write something new and weird, which eventually became the first section of Teachers. I read it at a launch event for Modern Queer Poets (another book by Pilot that features a poem of mine, alongside some of my literary heroes like Eileen Myles and Wayne Kostenbaum), and jokingly said “it’s part of a longer, book-length poem, so if anyone wants to publish it come and talk to me after the reading.” Rich came to talk [to] me, and the rest is history.

I also think that Teachers kind of captures my development as a writer, in terms of this desire to write more experimental work; something that comes through in the sort of poem/essay hybrid (although structurally I don’t think it’s quite a lyric essay); poetry is the guiding force for the language when it comes to rhythm, line breaks, and the presence of rhyme in the text. But a lot of people have said that the depth of the book is more of an essay; rooted in an argument, in history and criticism, but written in the form of a poem. In their blurb for Teachers, Isabel (the author of We are made of diamond stuff, and Gaudy Bauble), calls it a “personal essay,” and the more time I’ve spent on the book the more I think that rings true. I also think that it’s ended up being a sort of signpost for how much more comfortable I’ve become writing about and through personal experience.    

Sam Moore, All my teachers died of AIDS excerpt.All my teachers died of AIDS by Sam Moore. Published by Pilot Press London. 2020.

Death is the major theme in Teachers. You discuss how there is danger in being queer and queer love, whether that is the physical act itself, or the threat of a bigoted society. How do you come to terms with the inherited history of HIV/AIDS, that still affects many members of our community? Was this book a way of navigating that?

It’s an incredibly difficult thing to come to terms with, and I feel like I also should acknowledge that it’s probably an easier thing for me to navigate than it will be for other queer people; living in the UK it’s arguably a relatively safe and liberal place (although there are still times when this theory is disproven), and I think as the continued fight for liberation goes on – which it very much is – we need to acknowledge that certain members of our community are more vulnerable than others. The continued quote-unquote debate around trans rights highlights the fact that while for some of us it’s become easier to feel safe, or assimilate, we still need to show up to fight for our trans brothers, and sisters (and those who are both or neither).

Teachers is something that’s more about navigating the past than it’s about offering any kind of roadmap for the present (something that feels vital but would probably be better off being written by someone else). A lot of the book is about coming of age – both from an individual perspective and across the wider landscape of queer history and culture – and is about the shadow of death that remains cast over the queer community. That’s what the book is about coming to terms with (or trying to come to terms with anyway; I don’t think it entirely offers neat closure, but I also think that that’s good), a way of trying to understand – if not accept – the generation of queer people who were taken too soon. And while things are better, the threat of a bigoted society remains; certain victories on politics or policy aren’t enough to erase the very real danger a lot of queer people still face, and I think that’s an easy thing to forget.

All my teachers died of AIDS by Sam Moore excerpt. Published by Pilot Press London. 2020.

Even with HIV/AIDS treatments progressing to where we are today, with viral suppression and PrEP, for some, especially multiply marginalized people, HIV/AIDS is not a thing of the past, and there remains a strong link between the queer community and death. Crimes against our trans and gender non-conforming friends are rising, while the number of hate and white supremacy groups increase.  What do you see as the next fight that queer communities must take on to stop these cycles of death and violence?

I think that the next fight for queer communities is one to defend the rights of trans people, which, even in supposedly liberal countries, are under attack; here in the UK, court rulings on trans teens being unable to consent to puberty blockers is a very real threat to trans people. Between that and the continued megaphones given to TERFs and transphobes, it becomes clearer and clearer that liberation is still a ways off, and we need to keep fighting for it.

And it’s things like this that restart cycles of death for queer people; I can’t help but go back to the puberty blockers court ruling, and can’t stress enough the kind of impact that this could have on trans people. Between rulings like this, the continued acceptance of transphobia in a lot of mainstream media, the atmosphere of violence and danger from a generation ago that’s in Teachers is still here today, it’s just that the violence has become more focused on a specific group of queer people. And as much as people like to talk about debating those who disagree on the issue of trans rights, this feels like an inherently disingenuous position to take; so often it forces people in marginalized positions to debate their existence as if it were some kind of Oxford union debating idea rather than the reality of people’s lives. 

It felt poignant to read Teachers during the current pandemic. The loss of life, marginalized communities being more harshly affected, and the loss of shared safe spaces, all feel somehow familiarly queer. What effect do you think COVID will have on queer communities moving forward? 

Back in Lockdown 1.0 here in the UK in the spring (which feels like forever ago), is when Rich and I first started talking about bringing Teachers into the world, and if this was the best or worst time to do it. In the end, I’m glad we ended up waiting a little while because I always wanted to bring it out on World AIDS Day. Having the conversation did make it clear how strange it might feel to bring out a book about plague during a new plague year (although I find the comparisons between COVID and AIDS to be a bit of a reach, especially when it comes to how politicians have responded; the rapid response for a vaccine is obviously wonderful and should be commended but it also seems to highlight just how stark and long-lasting the government inaction was during the height of the AIDS crisis).

You’re right about the way in which this current outbreak feels uniquely queer, like a kind of echo of queer history. And I think that COVID will impact queer communities in ways that remind us how precarious queer life can still be, and how vital solidarity is moving forward. The racial disparities in COVID mortality rates are something that we need to keep in mind, especially given the fact that communities of colour remain the most heavily impacted by continued cases of HIV/AIDS. This is something that should galvanize people to action, to continue fighting for members of the queer community who continue to struggle and face oppression.

All my teachers died of AIDS by Sam Moore excerpt. Published by Pilot Press London. 2020.

Have you found any new teachers during this pandemic? Have you read/seen/heard anything that has been inspiring you? 

I think my reading highlight of 2020 might be Writers who love too much, an anthology of New Narrative writing that was co-edited by Dodie Bellamy; it’s so uniquely queer to me in the way that it refuses to adhere to convention (especially when it comes to writing around politics and sex), and in the way it explores life and literature in inherently intersectional ways. I found myself reading more non-fiction, and specifically more political writing this year, and a highlight from that is absolutely If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, an anthology edited by Angela Davis about racism, activism, and the prison system that remains vital almost 50 years after its publication.

Finally, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your next project, Search History.

I touched on Search History a little at the end of the Teachers launch reading I did on the Pilot Press Instagram (which is still available to watch there, and if people are interested in checking out the book then that’s definitely a great place to start), and just like I did with Teachers at the reading last year – and with Alex(andra) in this interview – I decided to say “if anyone wants to publish this weird book of essays, slide into my DMs.”

Search History is, as the title suggests, about history; both in the big-picture way that Teachers was, but also specifically in reference to a computer’s search history. It’s a series of experimental, lyric essays that each look at different ways in which sex and desire are acts of performance. So the book is about erotic archetypes (cowboys, bikers, schoolgirls), the performance of gender roles, and how that plays into sexual power dynamics, internet porn, and (auto)biography. Like a lot of my writing, it balances pop culture criticism with a dive into specifically queer aspects of cinema, theory, and porn. There’s one essay about catholic schoolgirls and bikers (the two archetypes are tied together through an autobiographical thread), and it touches on Britney Spears, Kenneth Anger, and Kathy Acker. 

I’d say about half of the essays have been written in one form or another, and the first one to be published – An elegy to the Nob Hill Theatre, an exploration of the geography of 70s gay porn, and the non-space of the internet archive – is coming out in early 2021 with Take Shape.

________________________________________

With new work to come, Moore continues to explore more topics at the crossroads of queer identities, collective history, and personal experience. In All my teachers died of AIDS, Moore is able to weave together their research, exploring important and morbid topics in an earnest and engaging read that many queer people will find relatable. All my teachers died of AIDS is available now through Pilot Press, and Moore can be found musing on Twitter and Instagram.

Profiles on Practice: Tazeen Qayyum

tazeen.qayyum-painter_Installation (1)
Portrait of Tazeen Qayyum, courtesy of the artist.

By Nadia Kurd

Trained as a miniature painter from the National College of Art (NCA) in Lahore, Pakistan, artist Tazeen Qayyum points to her mother’s encouragement as the source of her success. “She constantly encouraged me, drove across town every evening after her tiring job to take me to after-school art lessons” reflects Qayyum.[1] Such foundational encouragement prompted Qayyum to have confidence in her own voice and to pursue her art in Pakistan.

This encouragement soon paid off and Qayyum’s time at NCA during the 1990s solidified her practice. Much of her work critically draws on the long illustrative tradition of Central Asia, South Asia, and Iran. The practice of miniature painting — the brilliantly coloured miniaturized folio images—emerged in the Islamic lands during the 8th century with the introduction of paper from China. Commonly referred to as karkhana or ‘the painting workshop’, numerous medical manuscripts, legal treaties as well as the histories of rulers and most importantly, the holy Quran, were part of the elevated art practices amongst Ottoman, Persian and Mughal empires.[2]

The practice of miniature painting is an arduous one. Students training in the karkhana will sit on the floor for hours, focused on mark-making on handmade paper. The paper is often mounted on a takhti or ‘tablet’, which the student keeps propped up on their lap. The brush and paints are also skillfully handmade during the student training. The technique consists of “minute, repetitive brushstrokes render delicate figures in a painstaking technique called pardakht, a kind of linear pointillisme.”[3] While this finite yet vibrant practice serves the basis of Qayyum’s past and present work, she has continuously pushed the genre both conceptually and formally.

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Tazeen Qayyum. Thee Only Do I Love. Flexible acrylics, canvas, and plastic, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

For example, in the work “Thee Only Do I Love” (2010) the floral designs commonly found in traditional miniature works are transformed by the ice bags canvases upon which they are painted on. Moreover, the phallic nature of “Thee Only Do I Love” pushes the boundaries of accepted norms regarding sexuality and modesty within Muslim and South Asian cultures. The flowers depicted on the ice bags also represent fidelity and loyalty in Western culture.

Since 2002, one of the most enduring themes in Qayyum’s work has been the cockroach motif. The symbolism of the cockroach – a hardy insect that has long adapted to human life – is one that Qayyum uses because it elicits fear and has often been used as a metaphor for immigrants and those considered as outsiders.[4] In her 2011 work “Incubate” depicts a series of small paintings of cockroaches encased in Lucite (acrylic). In the 2013 work “A Holding Pattern”, installed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, the cockroach pattern features prominently throughout the backdrop and furniture of the work and is made of painted pieces of acrylic. These pieces are meticulously arranged in a grid pattern that mimics the wood lattice room dividers commonly found in Islamic architecture. The installation references the airport transit terminology for continuous routing loops when planes are unable to land, which serves as an apt metaphor for the various socio-political (often life or death) conundrums faced by refugees today.[5]

 

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Tazeen Qayyum. A Holding Pattern. Site-specific, mixed media installation
at the Toronto Pearson Airport, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

This repetitive patterning common in her cockroach themed work has evolved and informed her performance work. For example, in her recent performances such as “We Do not Know Who We Are Where We Go” (2012 and 2014-15), Qayyum centers herself on the drawing surface and begins to write in her native Urdu language using Perso-Arabic script in concentric circles. The repetitive, trance-like process of creating these works can span several hours. For Qayyum, the process to create these works allows the audiences of the performance to see how her body fully becomes the instrument, melded with the paintbrush, to create the cursive lines of script.[6]

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Tazeen Qayyum. We Do not Know Who We Are Where We Go-II, drawing performance, MIXER. 2014-15. Photo by Yuula Benivolski. Courtesy of the artist.

“I am confident to say that I have always prioritized my home and being a mother over my professional life,” reflects Qayyum. This has often meant passing on opportunities that may have propelled her into the limelight, however, this has not lessened the potency of Qayyum’s artistic output. Instead, her work continues to be driven by “what my narrative is, what is it that I want to investigate or say, what has moved me enough that I need to express my feelings, and then comes the ‘how.’”[7]

Qayyum’s work continues to push the limits of modern miniature painting. Her latest project, a series of multidisciplinary works called “Cover The Same Ground” (2020—), has been “created as worksheets of learning to draw a dead cockroach, breaking it down as fictional letters and language.”[8] Here, Qayyum continues to evaluate and piece together visual imagery to challenge the conceptions long shaped by colonialism and white supremacy in the imagining of the ‘Other’. Indeed, the ability to address the misuse of knowledge and its translation “into acts of bigotry and brutality through misrepresentations of socio-political and religious ideologies” features prominently in Qayyum’s art.”[9] In her work, Tazeen Qayyum brings these issues to the forefront using and expanding the established vocabulary of traditional miniature painting.  “Fear is no longer a mute condition” Qayyum points out, “I believe we are infinitely connected through thoughts, words, and actions, and I want my work to convey that as well.”[10]

To see more of Tazeen Qayyum’s artwork and future projects, visit www.tazeenqayyum.com or her Instagram @tazeenqayyum.

Nadia Kurd (she/her) is an art historian and curator based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan  (Edmonton, Alberta). Her work can be found on http://www.nadiakurd.com

 

[1] Tazeen Qayyum, interview by author, Edmonton, AB, May 16, 2020.

[2] Jonathan Bloom and Shelia Blair, Islamic Arts (New York: Phaidon Press Inc. 2006), 220.

[3] Louis Werner, “Reinventing the Miniature Painting”, (accessed May 20,2020).

https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200904/reinventing.the.miniature.painting.htm

[4] Leah Sandals, “Into the Deep”, Canadian Art, https://canadianart.ca/features/into-the-deep/ (accessed May 20,2020).

[5] Ibid.

[6] CBC Arts, “Why Tazeen Qayyum is Willing to Suffer Joint Pain for Her Art” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPUeQ4XSBMU, (accessed May 20,2020).

[7] Artist interview with Author.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

Complicated Signs: Marianne Nicolson in Transits and Returns

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Installation view of Marianne Nicolson, Oh, How I Long for Home, 2016, neon, SFU Art Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2017, in Transits and Returns, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2019–20, Photo: Maegan Hill-Carroll, Vancouver Art Gallery.

Transits and Returns

Vancouver Art Gallery

September 26, 2019-February 23, 2020

By Ada Dragomir

As I sit down to write these words, I feel a kind of sadness that is hard to articulate. I miss my grandmother’s steady teasing, her unending superstitious habits, her proverbs and expressions which—when translated into this jagged, dagger-for-smiles language—shrivel on my tongue, making sense to no-one. I missed the instructions for how to be a Romani woman, forfeited ancestral knowledge on right relationship, my embodied cultural teachings traded in for a citizenship card. As I ride the Vancouver Art Gallery escalator up to ​Transits And Returns,​ I can’t help but bring the other places I have been with me: the port blockades in support of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty, the overnight at Broadway and Cambie, the Grandview rail barricade, and the Bucharest University square where they shot into the crowd while I jingled keys on my father’s shoulders; a four-year-old in pigtails in the middle of the Christmas revolution. Sometimes, all of these places are really the same place, and my settlerness—my dislocation—is bound up within the greater Gordian knot of global capitalism and the colonial state, connected to the dislocation of the Wet’suwet’en, the ​Kwakw​a​k​a​’wakw​, and the Kanyen’kehà:ka. As I come into the whiteness of the gallery, I am tired, oscillating between brazen hope and exhausted collapse, but, under it all, ​Oh, How I Long for Home​.

Transits and Returns presents the polyphonic work of 21 Indigenous artists thematically contextualized by movement, territory, kinship, and representation. Curated by 5 distinct voices—Tarah Hogue, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Freja Carmichael, Léuli Eshraghi, and Lana Lopesi—the exhibition deftly bridges distinct Indigenous contexts with global experiences. If Transits and Returns aims to represent the complexity and multiplicity of Indigenous experience within the framework of rootedness and mobility, then Marianne Nicolson’s neon work, ​Oh, How I Long For Home,​ functions as a visceral and cerebral reminder that language, land, and home are the quiet and persistent spaces of resistance. The work speaks to generative refusal and the intricate negotiations—and frequent collapses—between past and present, here and not here, self and not-self. If ​Transits and Returns​ is about the discursive formation of Indigeneity in the ‘entre’ space of the Pacific, then Nicolson’s sculptural and linguistic sign is a hand that points in many directions simultaneously, making it easier and more difficult for us to find our way home.

For, if we truly desire justice beyond decolonial optics and performative solidarity, we must accept that the street signs and google maps, compasses and sextants, atlases, and star charts—though seemingly solid and incontrovertible—only function to set us further adrift.

For, if we truly desire justice beyond decolonial optics and performative solidarity, we must accept that the street signs and google maps, compasses and sextants, atlases, and star charts—though seemingly solid and incontrovertible—only function to set us further adrift. Nicolson’s neon reminds me of a conversation between UBC History Professor Coll Thrush, and Metis-Cree community planner and filmmaker Kamala Todd, in which they discuss our responsibility to place. Place has its own ancient laws, protocols, and cosmologies. They invite us—the uninvited guests—to sit in our disorientedness and to accept being off-balance and unsure. They talk about making space for paradox in order that we may find our way home.

Under the hot glow of a red neon sign, tucked away inside a grey offset room, I can feel the uncomfortable swelling in my chest that tells me I may cry. I breathe deeply, stare at the glowing words that are both familiar and unrecognizable, and ground myself again. Marianne Nicolson’s work makes me hot under the collar, forces my face towards the sun, and makes me think—confronted by my own lack of understanding. It brings to mind the teeming connections between the many frontlines at stake in the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, territory, and representation both within and beyond the walls of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Working formally with text, electrons, and light, and in the long history of neon works from Kosuth, to Flavin, to Nauman and Emin, Nicolson’s ​Oh, How I Long for Home​ immediately invokes the complex experiences of urban Indigenous people. Neon, once ubiquitous in the urban post-war consumerist boom—think Fred Herzog’s 1959 ​Granville/Robson​—now has a double meaning, standing in symbolically for the “seedy underbelly” of the metropolitan core, the inner-city slums, the Downtown Eastside, a dead man in a shopping cart. A week and a half ago, I saw the last remnants of that neon explosion near Main and Hastings, walking with hundreds of people for the 29th annual Memorial March for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Girls, Women and 2-Spirit folks. ​Oh, How I Long for Home​ makes unsettling formal connections between the urban realities that displacement causes, and like the Memorial March itself, speaks to the forced movements to and from territory, towards and away from kinship ties, in the complex web of people endeavouring to survive colonial legacies, greeting the ordinary daily sunrise as best they can.

Nicolson’s work participates in what Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson and writer, scholar, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson have termed generative refusal—refusal of the terms and conditions imposed on Indigenous subjects by the settler state, refusal of the neoliberal and colonial politic of recognition, refusal of the voyeuristic, fetishistic ethnographic gaze, and in many cases, refusal to centre settlerness at all[1]

According to the exhibition essay, the neon work “presents a phrase in ​Kwak’wala​, ‘​Wa’lasan xwalsa kan ne’kakwe,​’ which translates to the work’s English title,” while also sharing linguistic roots with ​Kwak’wala​ notions of returning home, and the dawn, or sunrise.

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Installation view of Marianne Nicolson, Oh, How I Long for Home, 2016, neon, SFU Art Collection, Gift of the Artist, 2017, in Transits and Returns, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 2019–20, Photo: Maegan Hill-Carroll, Vancouver Art Gallery.

Despite the act of translation, ​Oh, How I Long for Home​ intervenes as the sign of generative refusal for many gallery-goers as it denies us anything but an approximation of meaning, a jagged translation which misses entire worlds of embodied understanding, a symbol for an uncertain kind of belonging. Language—which contains entire universes of interrelationship, mental schemas, and cultural concepts, is an active site of resistance—another front-line for Indigenous resurgence. Alongside the linguistic implications of Nicolson’s work exist deeply political ones. The ​Kwak’wala​ language on the walls of the Vancouver Art Gallery, which until 1983 was the Vancouver Law Court, is a deeply meaningful act of ​Kwakw​a​k​a​’wakw​ visual sovereignty. But as I become more engaged in direct action and more politicized about Indigenous laws and titles, I would contend that visual sovereignty is not enough. Reserves are not enough, status is not enough, representation is not enough, reconciliation is not enough.

Neon words are only the beginning.

Home is invoked by Marianne Nicolson’s work in conceptual and embodied ways. From the fierce false heat of neon light, viewers must walk back and forth across the expanse of the grey room in order to access the work’s translated meaning. Placed opposite Bracken Hanuse Corlett’s Qvùtix, an animated creation myth displayed on a button blanket, ​Oh, How I Long for Home​ makes aggregate, non-stationary claims about what home actually is, and what it means to return home as an Indigenous person. Within the confines of the gallery space, home is an ideological and conceptual invocation, but to anyone who doesn’t currently live under a rock, Indigenous homeland in BC is a highly contested and deeply physical space, subject to colonial encroachment, capitalist greed, settler laws, and convenient “justice.” Returning home to live in one’s territories is a site of intricate personal, familial, and political negotiation for many Indigenous peoples living on the largely unceded lands of this province. It is no coincidence then, as Nicolson pines after home in ​Oh, How I Long for Home​, Indigenous youth across unceded British Columbia are demanding nation-to-nation dialogue, and above all, Indigenous reoccupation of traditional territories, that is, land back.

As I stare up into the face of this neon sun, I am reminded of another nuance; “​Transits​” can be read as movement—the journey of people, goods, ideas, and cultures—but also implies the passage of celestial bodies across each other’s planetary faces; the shadow of Europa traversing the face of Saturn, the glow of our overcast sunrise crossing Sydney’s round face as we pack up the last of the cold coffee, watched closely by VPD officers. ​Oh, How I Long for Home​ addresses the complexity of Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures in subtle and visceral ways, simultaneously invoking the contested spaces of land, language, and home but managing to dislodge us and disorient us from our familiar and flawed understandings.

Oh, How I Long for Home ​is a complicated sign, pointing simultaneously to our head, our heart, and our gut, asking us to sit in the strangeness of each other’s glow just a little while longer.

[1] Audra Simpson, Mohawk Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, 2014, Duke University Press

Leanne Betasamosake-Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, 2017, University of Minnesota Press.

 

Gio Swaby: She Used to be Scared of Hair Comb

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She Used to Be Scared of Hair Comb 1. 51cm x 71cm each. Fabric and Thread on Canvas. 2017.

By Gio Swaby

At the core of my practice is the desire to reimagine; taking something that once was and giving it new life. This is true for both physical objects and concepts. My work revolves around an exploration of identity, more specifically, the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. I am interested in the ways in which this physical identity can serve as a positive force of connection and closeness, while also examining its imposed relationship to otherness. Generally, my work begins with the development of a concept and from this point, I choose media most suitable to represent my ideas. In this way, I’ve constructed a practice that is interdisciplinary by nature. 

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Going Out Clothes 1. 79cm x 109cm each. Fabric and Thread on Canvas, Lace. 2018

While studying at the College of The Bahamas, I established a strong background in traditional forms of art-making. In my time at Emily Carr University, I explored forms of digital media primarily by way of video installations, performance, and filmmaking. Since my time after my BFA, I have intensely developed my textile practice, focusing primarily on portraiture as an exploration of the intersections of Blackness and womanhood and how they relate to identity.  I have experimented across several disciplines to form a current practice that encompasses fibre art, performance, and mixed media installation. 

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She Used to Be Scared of Hair Comb 3. 51cm x 71cm. Fabric and Thread on Canvas. 2017.

She Used to Be Scared of Hair Comb (1-3 of 10) is an example of my fibre-based practice and explores my primary themes of interest. This series demonstrates a process of detaching long-standing stigmas associated with Black hair and hosting a celebration of beauty in its place. This series is a nod of appreciation to Black women everywhere that have resisted the consistently reinforced narrative that Blackness has no relationship to beauty. As a whole, my fibre-based works recontextualize textiles outside of the negative connotations often connected to domesticity and instead bow in admiration of the awesomeness of womanhood. 

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Study of Self 3. 28cm x 36cm. Fabric and Thread on Canvas. 2020.

Artists such as Ebony Patterson and Kehinde Wiley influence my visual practice in their unapologetic and dynamic representation of Blackness and Black culture. I take inspiration from bell hooks’ “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black” and the ways in which she dissects the relationship between oppressed and oppressor. My ambition is that my work can reflect the strength of a Patterson or Wiley while remaining accessible to its intended audience in the same way that hooks has achieved. I hope to further the visibility of Blackness in art and academia and to continue to build upon the important works of influential thinkers and creators.

Each piece I create continues to build upon an integral aspect of my practice: to contribute to the visibility of Blackness in the art world. At many points in our lives, Black women can live within a paradox of hypervisibility and yet still not feeling truly seen. I want my work to function as a love letter of sorts to Black women, to create space for us not only to be represented but to be celebrated.