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
  

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