NORTH BY CURRENT FILM SCREENING & Q&A | SUNDAY 5 FEB
A special screening of Minax’s acclaimed film North by Current (2021) followed by a discussion between the artist filmmaker and DLWP Head of Exhibitions, Joseph Constable
Angelo Madsen Minax, The Source is a Hole, 2017, film still. Courtesy of the artist.
The multi-disciplinary practice of Angelo Madsen Minax reflects on trans intimacies and structures of kinship.
EXHIBITION CONTENT GUIDANCE : PLEASE READ BEFORE PLANNING YOUR VISIT
Due to the content of this exhibition we are suggesting that it may be most suitable for over 18s. However, this is not an enforced restriction and we are leaving the ultimate decision to the discretion of parents, guardians and carers.
We have provided information at the bottom of the page on what you can expect to see in the exhibition so that you can make an informed decision.
‘When two sets of eyelids approach each other for the first time, this is the first crisis of human contact … the lids are the first boundary you approach that divide what’s inside of each of you. Your distinct insides and their distinct insides’ (From Bigger on the Inside, 2022)
De La Warr Pavilion is pleased to present A Crisis of Human Contact, the first major institutional exhibition of multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax, whose practice spans documentary filmmaking, narrative cinema, essay film, media installation, sound, music, performance, text and collective practices.
Through film, photography, text and installation, A Crisis of Human Contact probes at the edges of what intimacy can and could look like. Taken from a voiceover in Minax’s film Bigger on the Inside (2022), the exhibition title highlights certain boundaries, limits, and (im)possibilities of interpersonal connection, which are explored through the different voices, characters and landscapes that the artist sets up.
The stories that Minax tells are often deeply personal; they draw upon friendships, romances, chosen family and family of origin, growing up in rural Michigan, and the nuanced embodiments of queerness and transness. They are also deeply radical – in their honesty, inquisitiveness, and ability to dwell in the at times painful and dark realities of kinship and selfhood – whilst also embedded with cathartic and spiritual expressions of sex, sexuality, love and desire. Through a collage-like approach to building this expansive visual language, Minax creates narratives that feel free, intuitive, mind-bending, playful, and highly moving. As he says: ‘I want my projects to make people feel something, and I want to feel something about them…you can’t preach justice. You just have to embed it in everything you do and make’.
The exhibition at DLWP brings together four of Minax’s recent films, including Bigger on the Inside, which comes to DLWP following its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival and screenings at New York and Sundance Film Festivals, and a new work made especially for this presentation, Rehearsals Toward an Erotic Approach (2022), that highlights the significance of sex work and kink as generative processes of play and renegotiation. The exhibition also includes Minax’s 2017 work, The Source is a Hole, a video essay and ‘treatise on transsexual mourning’, and At the River (2020), a tense portrayal of familial chaos in middle America. These filmic anchors are accompanied by a series of photographs, collages and text pieces, as well as various interventions throughout the gallery. Visitors will enter into an environment that is at once quiet and noisy, intimate and heady – an idiosyncratic cosmology where landscape, place, love, sex, kinship and spirituality intersect.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a newly commissioned text on Minax’s work by artist, theorist, historian and professor of visual studies, Jill H. Casid will be freely available as part of an accompanying booklet.
This exhibition comprises moving image, photographs and text which contain the following:
- Full-frontal nudity and genitalia
- Blood
- Explicit sexual acts
- References to drug use
PROGRAMMED EVENTS
MY GENDERATION FILM MAKING WORKSHOP | SUNDAY 23 APRIL
An exciting film making workshop for young people, led by artist and director Fox Fisher (My Genderation) with a focus on storytelling for LGBTQIA+ voices.
QUEER LIFE DRAWING | SAT 23 FEB, SAT 25 MAR, SAT 29 APR
Life drawing and conversations led by artist Miles Coote. Three sessions focusing on three different themes with different sitters; Horticulture, the environment and queer cooperatives, Queer identities surrounding sex and sexual health, and a focus on the art of Angelo Madsen Minax and Miles Coote.
BODIES IN SONG | SUNDAY 23 APRIL
Led by non-binary artists and musicians Alex Etchart and Amelia ‘Ace’ Armande, this workshop aims to connect participants musically and lyrically, exploring the expression of self and community around gender and trans*cending gender with the aim of creating a collective song.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Angelo Madsen Minax’s projects explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological structures of kinship, metaphysical and technological phenomena, archival documents, and speculative imagination. Drawing on elements of auto-ethnography and psychodynamics, the artist’s work is fuelled by his history of participation in justice-oriented communities and DIY media activism. Minax’s works have been shown at Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, KurzFilm Hamburg, the European Media Art Festival, Berwick Media Arts Festival, Alchemy Festival of Moving Image, and dozens of LGBT film festivals around the world. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. Minax is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont and a Queer|Art Mentor. He was recently awarded an International Documentary Association (IDA) Award for Best Writing for his feature film North By Current, and is a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellow.
RESOURCES
Kink as Method by Jill H. Casid
A theorist, historian and artist, Jill H. Casid is Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005) and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015 and forthcoming in Spanish translation with Ediciones Metales Pesados) as well as the co-edited volume Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014), Casid reconstitutes landscape, projection, and the geopolitics of art historical method as critical objects vital to intersectional queer and trans*feminist interrogation. Casid is currently completing Necrolandscaping, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Recent articles have appeared in Art in America, Women and Performance, TDR, and elsewhere. Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in exhibitions at Signs and Symbols and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York and Documenta 15.
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Staying locally
There are plenty of welcoming and good value B&Bs & boutique hotels in Bexhill. The De La Warr Pavilion regularly uses the following :
Travel information
- By Rail
Direct trains go from London Victoria, Brighton and Ashford to Bexhill.
There are also trains from London Charing Cross, changing at St. Leonards Warrior Square and from London Bridge or Charing Cross going to Battle. Battle is only a short taxi journey away (15 mins approx).
Visit www.nationalrail.co.uk for up-to-date train travel information. - Taxis
Town Taxis: 01424 211 511
Parkhurst Taxis: 01424 733 456 - By Car
If driving from the London area:
Take the M25, then A21 to Hastings. Turn off at John‘s Cross and follow the signs to Bexhill.
OR
Take the A22 to Eastbourne, go across the Bishop roundabout to the A271 and follow the signs to Bexhill and the seafront. The De La Warr Pavilion is on the Marina.
From the Brighton area:
Follow the A27 out of Brighton until you arrive in Bexhill On Sea. - Parking
Please be aware the Rother District car park outside the De La Warr Pavilion operates paid parking until 8pm. After this time parking is free. There is also lmiited free car parking along the seafront.
Accessibility
Within the limits of this Grade One listed building, the De La Warr Pavilion strives to be fully accessible with a range of facilities to support your visit.
Assistance Dogs are permitted into the building.
Please contact the Box Office on 01424 229 111 to arrange a visit.
Facilities for disabled visitors
- Ramped access at the front of the building
- A low counter at the Box Office and Information Desk
- Disabled toilets on two floors
- A lift to all floors
- Accessible galleries on both floors
- An accessible Café
- Spaces for wheelchairs in the auditorium for seated events
- Ramped access in the auditorium for events during the day
- Ramped access into the Studio
- Two travel wheelchairs are available for use at the De La Warr Pavilion. To reserve, please call our box office and information desk on (01424) 229111 or ask a member of staff on arrival. The chairs are provided on a first come, first served basis and are intended for use inside the Pavilion. Please contact us for more information.
Facilities for blind or visually-impaired
- Large print season brochures
Facilities for the hard-of-hearing
- An T-Switch induction loop in some areas of the auditorium (please indicate when booking as this facility is not available on the balcony)
- British Sign Language interpretation tours of the building and exhibitions are available on request.