“Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects”

Trans people have always existed, but it is an existence without memorial, instead marked by violence and the undermining of basic human rights. “Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects,” a multi-iteration exhibition, presents artworks together with archival material of and by those artists outside of stereotypical gender binaries to construct a critical history of transgender art and lived experience. Its most recent staging was at the University of Victoria-affiliated Legacy Gallery, its only Canadian showing to date.

Curated by Seattle-based artist Chris Vargas, the exhibition is the touring output of the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA), Vargas’s conceptual project of institutional critique, which exists online (sfmotha.org) and in its public gallery iterations. Drawing from the UVic Transgender Archives (the world’s largest such public archive), Vargas selected an expanse of material that negates any singular reading of a trans identity. Included are commonplace items such as a children’s trading card for the character Half Nelson from the 1980s series “Garbage Pail Kids,” a Cabbage Patch doll-parody, of which the Wikipedia entry defines characters as having “a comical abnormality, [or] deformity.” (One half of Half Nelson is clad in overalls and carries a wrench, the other half in pigtails and pink pinafore, split vertically down the middle.) Vargas’s term “hirstory” hybridizes the feminist reclamation of “herstory” with the male possessive; “trans” is more difficult to define. Professor Stephen Whittle, writing in The Guardian in 2010, traces the etymology of “transvestite” to the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910, while “androgyne” was recorded in 1552. The term “transgender” dates to 1971, and Vargas’s definition exemplifies the term’s fluidity, ranging from a core identity, to an overly vague descriptive, to a colonial construction; and the contributions for “Trans Hirstory” cover a range of nonconforming identities. The 99 objects noted in the title is a riff on the BBC Radio 4 and British Museum A History of the World in 100 Objects, suggesting the arrogant impossibility of defining anything so expansive with a finite limit of objects, yet playfully attempting to do so at the same time.

Artworks from the archive include Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, snapshot-like images of Goldin’s friends (many of whom were drag queens) in New York and Berlin against the backdrop of the early days of the AIDS crisis. Three contemporary artists’ works have been curated for the space, including Vivek Shraya’s Trisha, 2016. Shraya, a Calgary-based artist, recreates photographs of his mother in a period of her life before motherhood. Shraya’s clothes echo her stylish mother as she carries out tasks—holding a telephone conversation, cutting a cake—against 1970s settings. Shraya writes that while the artist’s body resembles that of her father, her “gestures” and how she “loves and rages” are modelled on her mother. Aiyyana Maracle (born on Six Nations territory near Ohsweken, Ontario, and who died in 2016), offers an alternate framework to a Eurocentric construction of gender with video work. It is worth noting, for international readers, that the term “two spirit” represents an Indigenous alternative to the binary understanding of gender adopted through colonization (though Maracle identified as female).

The standout work of the exhibition is the performance Becoming an Image (2012–) by Cassils (formerly of Montreal, now a US citizen in LA), which was presented in two forms: as a live performance on March 7, 2018; and in the gallery as black and white framed documentary photographs of an earlier version of the same performance. In the live work, the artist attacks a 2,000-pound block of clay with kicks and punches in total darkness, before a standing audience who is permitted to view only occasional glimpses, by way of flashes from the documenting photographer’s camera. With sight limited, the lasting sensory experience of the performance is its sound. Cassils breathes in fast, and controls the exhalations while making sounds of extreme physical exertion that resemble the noises of exercise, sex or childbirth as they kick, climb and punch the clay. Flashes trigger retina burns of the artist’s figure, which then dissipate back into darkness. Cassils has previously taken a cue from feminist performance artworks such as Eleanor Antin’s, and they are sophisticated in the melding of the aesthetic language of classical sculpture, feminist performance, conceptualism and sensationalist imagery in the photographic medium. The audience watches the durational performance where sculptural aesthetics come into dialogue with the ethics of a trans body in public space, yet the artist controls the gaze of their extremely strong body (trained though a regime of diet, body building and martial arts).

“Trans Hirstory” highlights the pervasiveness and multifariousness of gender nonconformity, underlining the simultaneous lack of equality of those who challenge the stereotypes of the binary. Through the juxtaposition of contemporary artworks and historical objects in the public gallery, “Trans Hirstory” asserts a right to public space and demands dialogue on the place of trans people in society. ❚

“Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects” was exhibited at Legacy Gallery, Victoria, from January 13 to March 29, 2018.

After 15 years in London, Kim Dhillon now writes about art from Vancouver Island. She teaches critical theory at the University of Victoria.