What does it mean to come out at a time when homosexuality was classified as a crime? Artists Stuart Mayes and Conny Karlsson Lundgren both work with archives to reinterpret queer historiography. This discussion focuses on the visibility of LGBTQI lives, structures of desire and the role of archives – material that is recoded through artistic and performative interpretations.
This conversation brings together two artistic practices that, in different ways, engage with LGBTQI history, archives and visibility, and with the archive as both a repository of information and a structure of power. Can art create new ways of ‘coming out’ in history? Of making complex life stories visible and legible. The conversation also touches on how homosexuality has historically been defined as a crime or an illness, and what traces this has left in the archives and in today’s public debate.
Stuart Mayes moves between archival research, performance and storytelling in textile spatial installations, often drawing on personal and collective queer experiences. The current exhibition, Following Eugène: A Spring Outing at Uppsala Art Museum centres on the significance and reception of Eugène Jansson’s paintings of nude youths, which premiered in Uppsala in 1907, as well as the radical nature of exhibiting them.
Conny Karlsson Lundgren regularly works with historical archives – photographs, official documents and institutional collections – to highlight how norms surrounding gender and sexuality have been produced and reproduced. In his solo exhibition *Jag kysser dina ögon* at Bonniers Konsthall, he brought queer lives and structures of desire to the fore, whilst also raising questions about class society, norms and discipline. Lundgren is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet and the Gothenburg Museum of Art. In 2023, *Gläntan*, Sweden’s first permanent LGBTQI+ monument, which he produced, was unveiled in Gothenburg.