Justice
Summary
A 30 minute long performance produced in co-operation with Out in the City, a community group of senior Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer People. A choral performance derived from original archival and social research into an obfuscated trial of 29 men for homosexual acts in the UK between the inter-war years.
Supported by
The People’s History Museum, Manchester and Out in the City and Age UK.
Description of project
Following from my 2010 exhibition, Untitled (On a Day Unknown), the Manchester based community group Out in the City, re-worked the original performance to develop Justice. Justice is an iteration of a trial from 1936 at which 29 men were tried individually, in pairs and groupings and collectively for homosexual acts. In the original iteration, Untitled (On a Day Unknown), commissioned and exhibited by the Whitworth Art Gallery (UK) the work included only drawings conducted by an official court artist and pinhole photographs documenting a recalling of this trial performed in private within a court room interred in Manchester Police Museum by members of Out in the City and invited guests.
However, Justice disclosed the trial through allowing witnessing of a performance derived from collating newspaper reports, archival research, legal documents and ephemera into a spoken word, choral performance. In converse to the original iteration where only the nebulous nature of the ‘eye-witnessed’ transfer to the pictorial was engaged in questioning the subjectification of the sexualized body through the body of legality, Justice challenged the nebulousness of ‘the word’ as record. Intentionally no pictiorial or moving image documentation was allowed, re-asserting the temporal nature of the overall project.
Type of work
Performance Art
Published in
People’s History Museum, Manchester, UK
Date
2014-02-27Creator
Bowman, Jason E.
Out in the City
Keywords
Queer History
Performance Art
the Archive
Live Art
Publication type
artistic work
Language
eng