This summer Hayward Gallery presents Kiss My Genders, a group exhibition celebrating more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity.
Spanning the past 50 years, Kiss My Genders brings together over 100 artworks by artists from around the world who employ a wide range of approaches to articulate and engage with gender fluidity, as well as with non-binary, trans and intersex identities.
Working across photography, painting, sculpture, installation and video, many of the artists in Kiss My Genders move beyond a conventional understanding of the body, and in doing so open up new possibilities for gender, beauty and representations of the human form.
The exhibition includes new and site-specific works by Chitra Ganesh, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings and Jenkin van Zyl. Occupying the entire Hayward Gallery, Kiss My Genders also extends beyond the gallery walls, with artworks by Ad Minoliti and Athi-Patra Ruga and a poem by Tarek Lakhrissi that transform elements of Southbank Centre’s wider site.
The exhibition’s title is taken from the song ‘Transome’ by singer-songwriter Planningtorock, who also performs as part of the exhibition’s public programme.
Featured artists
Ajamu, Travis Alabanza, Amrou Al-Kadhi & Holly Falconer, Lyle Ashton Harris, Sadie Benning, Nayland Blake, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Flo Brooks, Luciano Castelli, Jimmy DeSana, Jes Fan, Chitra Ganesh, Martine Gutierrez, Nicholas Hlobo, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Joan Jett Blakk, Tarek Lakhrissi, Zoe Leonard, Ad Minoliti, Pierre Molinier, Kent Monkman, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Planningtorock, Christina Quarles, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Hunter Reynolds, Athi-Patra Ruga, Tejal Shah, Victoria Sin, Jenkin van Zyl and Del LaGrace Volcano.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring original essays by Amrou Al-Kadhi, Paul Clinton, Charlie Fox, Jack Halberstam, Manuel Segade and Susan Stryker, an excerpt from Renate Lorenz’s influential Queer Art: A Freak Theory, and poetry by Travis Alabanza, Jay Bernard, Nat Raha and Tarek Lakhrissi. The catalogue also features a roundtable discussion between a number of participating artists and the exhibition’s guest curator Vincent Honoré.