In his research for the project, Fiks drew on the work of Oxford historian Dan Healey, author of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (2001). Queer Russians found pleasure, Fiks reminds us, in these contradictions, jokingly setting up dates at the Lenin statue by saying, ‘Let’s meet at Aunt Lena’s.’ The locations featured in the exhibit include the public toilets at the Lenin Museum, the Karl Marx statue at Sverdlov Square and Gorky Park (named after Maxim Gorky, who once proclaimed in a 1934 Pravda article: ‘Eradicate homosexuals and fascism will disappear’). The artist takes unmistakable delight in how queer Muscovites transformed prominent Soviet monuments into cruising spots, appropriating the revolution, as he says, while also asking it to stay true to its promise of liberation for all people. Fiks, who is Jewish, describes the photos as a ‘kaddish’ for older generations of ‘Soviet gays’, but the tone of the show is more irreverent that funerial. Courtesy: the artist and Ugly Duckling PresseĬurrently on display at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, Fiks’s show is comprised of photographs, taken in 2008, of Soviet-era gay cruising sites ( pleshkas, as they’re called in Russian). Yevgeniy Fiks, Sverdlov Square, mid 1930s – 1980s, ‘Moscow’, 2008, photograph. It never occurred to me that these moments alone in the Russian capital were missed opportunities for sexual encounters but, after seeing ‘Moscow: Gay Cruising Sites of the Soviet Capital, 1920s–1980s’, the new show from Russian-American artist Yevgeniy Fiks, I realize what a failure of imagination I had. Pass it on.It always struck me as odd when I was living in Moscow that, in a city of 12 million people, I had so many occasions to be alone – in metro underpasses late at night, in snow-covered courtyards, in the endless maze of backstreets and alleyways. Take family pictures for example: the genre that bridges generations, creates a sense of belonging, and shapes collective memory gay community cannot find itself there. Even the archives that are dedicated to queer legacy often lack alternatives. Time has passed, but those stereotypes live on. He realised his identity in the 90’s, and grew up surrounded by visually stereotypical representations of gay men in mass culture. Pablo was born in the 80s in Spain, has lived in the USA for almost seven years, and in 2019 moved to the Netherlands. In addition to the section on the Homologie magazine from the IHLIA collection, the exhibition also consists of two parts in which the representation of gay men in the USA and in Spain is highlighted. The first group contains images of the body, the second group contains images about norms and expectations and the third group contains images about love, relationships and communities. Pablo Lerma rearranged and reframed these images into three thematic groups. Pablo Lerma went through this magazine chronologically and selected images that specifically represent the experiences of gay men. Homologie was a cultural-scientific magazine that published on the history of homosexuality and developments in gay studies. The exhibition It Doesn’t Stop at Images tells a new story with images from the magazine Homologie (1978-1997) that breaks the stereotype and the ‘cliché’ images of the gay community. Lerma has spent the past three years researching the concept of masculinity and the lack of representation of gay men and queer communities in the history of photography. An international linked data vocabulary of LGBTI termsĪt IHLIA we will be showing the exhibition It Doesn’t Stop at Images by Pablo Lerma from the first week of November.An indispensable part of the IHLIA collection.Archives from private individuals and organisations.Pink Cabinet (non-fiction) and House of all Languages (fiction).
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Official data from IHLIA, such as annual accounts and multi-year policy plan.Collecting the past and present informs and inspires the future.