RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY

Curated by Nathan Storey, RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY is an exhibition featuring six interdisciplinary artists with diverse backgrounds reckoning with queer histories, pasts, archives, legacies, and loss within their own contemporary studio practices. The artists in RUINS search for their fragmentary pieces and reimagine queer constellations as they unearth LGBTQ+ histories. They grapple with their collective pasts, allowing them to look toward queer futures.



For this exhibition, I presented a new typeset, SOMEONE I LOVE IS FIGHTING LIKE HELL FOR PALESTINE, in the Hinds Hall 2024 Columbia University Protest font. I created the font from protest signs and banners from the 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus occupations, which took place from April 17, 2024, to June 2, 2024.



Using this typeset, I am presenting a new video work of a quote from “Against The Death Wish, in a death-obsessed world”. The quote:

This quote goes in and out of focus, being replaced by the lowercase letters of the font all shown as symbols of a Palestine man and woman in chains holding a key (a reference to the “right to return” movement) used in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)( a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice, and equality). This work is about how seamlessly Zionists wish and perpetuate death upon fellow humans they have never even met so easily and horrifically.







Also on view is a takeaway object based on a banner from Gay Freedom Day in San Fransisco in June 1970 that states, “Our fight has just begun.” While pursuing my MFA, I added the “again and again” to show solidarity with past protest movements and connect our struggles for liberation. In this context, it shows the long arch of liberation faced by Palestinians during their occupation by the Israeli government.