Kiss My Genders review: Enthralling exhibition with a crucial sense of activism

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Ben Luke13 June 2019

The phrase “kiss my genders” originates in Planningtorock’s song Transome, a celebration of trans identity. In a photographic portrait in the show, Planningtorock gazes out at us, their face enhanced with prosthetics. “I get excited about terminologies around fluidity or liquidness in sexuality and gender.”

Excitement and celebration of fluid identities dominate this show, featuring 30 artists spanning the past half century; it’s often thrillingly exuberant. But amid the flamboyance is also a crucial sense of activism.

At the heart of the exhibition is a queering of the tradition of portraiture, often in photographs. The trans artists Juliana Huxtable and Martine Gutierrez both create spiritual beings through transformation: Huxtable is sci-fi and futuristic; Gutierrez a reincarnated Latin American goddess.

The display can be too fussy: the starkness of the photographs of Catherine Opie, Zanele Muholi and Del LaGrace Volcano doesn’t need the elaborate screens-and-mirror staging it’s given here. And the show becomes wayward and uneven, too, when it strays beyond photography, video and performance and into painting and sculpture.

Though not presented in a linear way, there’s a rich history of drag in art here, from Pierre Molinier’s erotic photomontages, including a portrait of Luciano Castelli, to Castelli’s own self-portrait watercolours and photos. Peter Hujar’s photographs of the drag performers the Coquettes and his image of the Warhol star Candy Darling on her deathbed reflect his rich emotional range.

Meanwhile, in a pristine all-white environment is Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Silent, in which the singer Aérea Negrot stands in a Berlin square that was the site of refugee protest camp, first performing John Cage’s seminal silent work 4’33” before unleashing an angry song of her own: “Dear visitor, are you optimistic when our country is at war?” It’s the most searing moment in a show that frequently enthrals.

Until September 8 (020 3879 9555, southbankcentre.com)

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