Cruising Atlas, Architecture, Dissident Sex and Cruising Cultures
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou
In the vibrant nexus of cultural exploration and as part of their ongoing project 0 Feet Away, Büchsenhausen Fellow Agil Abdullayev orchestrates a gathering that promises to illuminate the clandestine world of queer cruising culture. Drawing together the co-curators of the renowned Cruising Pavilion, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou, Abdullayev will stage an evening of intellectual revelry, inviting attendees to delve into the depths of this often overlooked facet of human interaction.
Cruising culture represents more than mere dalliances in hidden spaces; it is a potent symbol of resistance, community, and the renegotiation of societal norms. Through their work, Mateos, Teyssou, and Abdullayev elevate cruising from the margins to the forefront of cultural discourse, inviting us to reconsider the spaces we inhabit and the identities we construct within them.
Central to the presentation at Büchsenhausen will be Mateos and Teyssou’s curatorial approach, honed through their groundbreaking exhibition, Cruising Pavilion. The exhibition, which originated at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018 before traversing continents to be showcased in New York’s Ludlow 38 and Stockholm’s Arkdes, offered a multidimensional exploration of cruising culture‘s intersections with architecture, art, and dissent. As the duo now embarks on the creation of a seminal book, their lecture is a tantalizing hint at the intellectual feast to come. Delving into the symbiotic relationship between cruising cultures and the evolution of artistic forms, from architecture to cinema, in Büchsenhausen they will offer and discuss a panoramic view of human expression and subversion.
Agil Abdullayev is a cross-disciplinary artist from Azerbaijan, manifesting their practice through performance, critical discussions, paintings, video, and film. The semi-biographical practice of Agil examines queer identity and how socio-political domination has shaped it in Azerbaijan and other South Caucasian countries. Their films read the queer body as an archive that addresses queer anxieties; they refer to escapism and queer utopia with sci-fi aesthetics. Agil regards their childhood experiences as an archive of personal history, transhistorical memory, and space of hyper-possibility where representations of queer narratives can be disrupted, re-articulated, and reinvented.
Agil holds a BA of Fine Arts from Nottingham Trent University and took part in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have been awarded by the Prince Claus Foundation and SudKultur Fund and have exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial, The Wrong Biennial, South London Gallery, Photographers’ Gallery, Tate Modern, Asian Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Goethe Institut in Baku and Tbilisi, and MoMA Tbilisi.
https://agilabdullayev.info/
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou are a duo of curators based in Paris. Their current projects include Paris Orbital, a public program at the Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce on the links between Parisian mythologies and pulp culture, and a publication on homosexual cruising with HEAD (Geneva) and Spector Books (Leipzig). In 2024, they will organize the Art Basel’s Conversations de Paris+ program (October) and inaugurate the first session of Stavanger Secession, a discursive and visual program in Stavanger (Norway).
Location
Künstler:innenhaus Büchsenhausen