VOGUE FRANCE ARTICLE
23/10/2024
The TRANS*GALACTIQUE exhibition celebrates the plurality of trans gaze
Until February 9th 2025, La Gaîté Lyrique is hosting a photo and video exhibition featuring fifteen artists celebrating trans perspectives, at the intersection of queerness, anti-racism and ecology.
‘Posing models, compensating for a lack of representation, rejecting binary and closed fictions of identity”: these are the ambitious objectives that the four curators of TRANS*GALACTIQUE are tackling. Performers and artists Nadège Piton, SMITH, Frank Lamy and Balthazar Heisch are continuing the work begun by the first two in 2020 in the eponymous issue of the magazine The Eyes, which questioned the place of photography in the construction of imaginaries around trans bodies.
The artist-curators are extending their curation by taking over a small, intimate room at the Gaîté Lyrique. The exhibition brings together the work of trans artists from all walks of life who use photography and video as emancipatory media, putting care, community and struggle back at the heart of the narrative. It’s a way of reclaiming power over stolen narratives, in a global context where transphobia is on the rise.
Paradoxically, there is no question here of showing trans-identity as such: ‘Trans people are generally represented as trans objects. We want to turn the narrative on its head, by celebrating the work of trans people who are also talking about other things’, explains SMITH.
When trans-identity is tackled head-on, the aim is to show the struggles that bodies go through rather than the bodies themselves. From objects, they become subjects; from ends in themselves, they become means.
By Tal Madesta
