Glorious failure

Dr Siobhán McGuirk is an anthropologist, curator and filmmaker whose work examines the intersections of migration, sexuality and gender, and law and society. She uses creative, collaborative methods to create work that is accessible to broad audiences and that has scholarly, social and political impact. Her co-edited volume, Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry (PM Press, 2020), and role as co-editor of Red Pepper magazine reflects this ethos. She is Research Lead for the Friends of the Joiners Arms – a collective creating radically accessible space for queer communities – and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Almería.

In this talk, I examine some of the challenges and possibilities of transnational artistic collaboration with a queer, feminist, decolonial lens by reflecting critically on my work within the UKRI-funded ‘Global Gender and Cultures of Equality’ project (2018-2022). In the project, six teams – comprising academics, artists, NGO staff and local communities – used creative methods to explore how ‘cultures of equality’ can be created and sustained, locally and globally. Our contexts were varied, from sex workers battling criminalization in Cape Town, to LGBTQ+ poets exploring identity in Manila, to favela-based artists deconstructing masculinity in Rio de Janeiro. My role was to develop exhibitions that captured our work and politics. That process of collaborative curation demanded we place into conversation visual, sensorial and interactive artworks that presented distinct perspectives on gender justice and divergent, even oppositional ideas about what ‘cultures of equality’ entail. After outlining the project, I explain the conceptual approaches guiding our curatorial ethos, including a commitment to experimentation informed by my understanding, following Halberstam, of ‘failure’ as a ‘queer art’. Decolonial praxis further encouraged us to queer and to query traditional academic and institutional metrics of ‘success’ and of ‘authenticity’. I consider carefully how exhibition infrastructure can make such critical interventions visible, particularly within the spatial confines of an elite university campus in London, a centre of colonial extraction and power. Representation of the knotty and often incomplete processes of negotiation, translation and debate we engaged in – frequently mediated through digital technologies – was a core commitment. Metaphors, and later motifs, of ‘connecting threads’ and ‘crossed wires’ helped us to recognize processes of disentanglement as productive. In closing, I present the resultant exhibition, [Re]Locating Cultures of Equality, elucidating how we sought, through installations and spatial organisation, to place locally-specific feminist, queer and decolonial politics into productive conversation. I invite attendees to consider the success (or failure) of the exhibition on its own queer terms.

This webinar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship and follow the Centre on Twitter.