‘Homage’ Traces Queer Artistic Legacies

The premise of ‘Homage: Queer lineages on video’, curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, is simple: queer people look for family and friends across time and space. Here, this proposition has art historical effects. In Garden (2018), Kang Seung Lee brings together two of his personal heroes: English filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman and Korean writer and activist Joon-soo Oh. Neither Jarman nor Oh – both of whom died from AIDS-related complications in the 1990s – knew of the other during their lifetime. Across a three-channel video, Lee is seen visiting their gardens, burying drawings and transferring soil between the two. The gesture of exchange and connection comes to a head as Lee imagines that his life has emerged from the union of these artistic ‘parents’.

We can traverse these organic lineages as we pass through the show. Near Lee’s work is Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s For Bruce (致布魯斯) (2022), a two-channel installation that lingers on reflections in ponds and streams. In long, lingering shots, the video melds the style of experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie, who died in 2020, with Apichatpong’s own measured cinematography. One might imagine untold numbers of drawings buried in Apichatpong’s tranquil ecosystems. Walk on, then, to P. Staff’s film The Foundation (2015), which features the drawing sessions that take place at the Los Angeles archives of the Finnish artist Tom of Finland and the communities that form there.

In ‘Homage’, six of the eight works are on speakers, and I lingered in those moments where the sound of one might bleed into that of another: unintentional overlaps that represent their own kind of cross-pollination. (Has anyone written a history of sound bleed?) Lee’s other work in the show, The Heart of a Hand (2022) – in which Filipino dancer Serafin reinterprets a work by Singaporean choreographer Goh Choo San, who died in 1987 – features a pounding, feral soundtrack from trans composer and musician KIRARA. While I stood watching, dance and techno bass lines wafted over tinnily from the headphones accompanying Tony Cokes’s SM BNGRZ 1+ 2 (2021), which ruminates on the role of raving in queer community. That pulse reappears in a different timbre in a video by an artist from a younger generation: Carolyn Lazard’s Red (2021), where a strobing red light, created by the artist moving their thumb over the lens of an iPhone camera, is paired with a countdown on a separate screen, alerting viewers to the potentially epilepsy-triggering flashing light. Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, Red recalls Jarman’s film Blue (1993) while drawing attention to dimensions of access and care.

This show is careful to thread these queer artists’ interventions into art history. In Dineo Seshee Bopape’s a love supreme (2005–06), the South African artist licks chocolate off a pane of glass in front of the screen. It serves as an effortlessly queer, bodily rejoinder to the idea that video art is a ‘mirror’ mired in the ‘aesthetics of narcissism’ (in the words of Rosalind Krauss in her 1976 essay ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’). As if to say, ‘Yes … and?’, Bopape literally eats the barrier between her and the viewer, turning video’s performativity into an absurd, sultry performance. For a show about queer homage, I wanted only more camp, more pop culture. But in the end, I was happy to sit and listen – to try to discern, in the bleed, the outline of a community that exceeds the here and now.

‘Homage: Queer lineages on video’ is on view at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery until 19 October

^{Main image: ‘Homage: Queer lineages on video’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Trustees of Columbia University, courtesy Wallach Art Gallery; photograph: Olympia Shannon}