United Contemporary
Toronto, ON, Canada
Exhibition Essay
Artwork Descriptions
Steven Beckly, Camille Charbonneau, Rami George, Dylan Glynn, Jordan King, Natia Lemay, Oluseye, Ry Van Der Hout
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
Photo by Darren Rigo
José Esteban Muñoz says that we are not yet queer. That queerness is not yet here, that it is an ideality that we may never touch, only something we can “feel as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” In the late theorist’s seminal 2009 text, Cruising Utopias, Muñoz posits that queerness is about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.
What does it mean, then, to be here now, in the present? To live with the fragmented momentum of the past while gazing at the fog of an uncertain future, when hard-won rights that seemed certain slip away in each day’s headlines? When actions accepted into the dominant narrative of history are erased or obscured? When identity, visibility, and language become a trap, and we find safety, once again, in opacity and the unsaid? When the promise of linear progress toward liberation falters, can queerness hold? Where do we turn when we cannot accept the current moment as enough?
Queer Asynchroniesturns toward alternate temporalities of queer and trans experience – ways of inhabiting time that unfold alongside, against, or beyond dominant narratives of development, productivity, or progress. Rather than centring queerness as an identity or a distinct community of people, Queer Asynchronies examines queerness as defined by experience. Turning away from the idea of a lineage of queerness centred on history and civil rights, the artists featured in Queer Asynchroniesmove between temporal registers of ancestry, collective memory, deep time, childhood, and futurity, tracing layered and nonlinear relations to inherited pasts and imagined futures.
Foregrounding moments of rupture, transformation, and rebirth, the exhibition considers how queer and trans lives are often shaped through a continual process of becoming. Engaging asynchrony as both a lived condition and critical framework, the artists gathered here trace repeated acts of reinvention that unsettle linear understandings of time, opening possibilities beyond the limits of the present.