Thinking Flesh (2026)

30/09/2026

𝓎ℴ𝓊 𝒶𝓇ℯ 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓌𝒽ℴ 𝒸𝒶𝓂ℯ 𝒷ℯ𝒻ℴ𝓇ℯ, 𝓎ℴ𝓊 𝒶𝓇ℯ 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓌𝒽ℴ 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒸ℴ𝓂ℯ 𝒶𝒻𝓉ℯ𝓇

Flicking through the glossy pages of ‘s collaborative art book, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s deliberate gesture of refusing to cite cis white male authors springs to mind, of how through departing from certain spaces we can forge new and affirming structures of belonging:

“Citation is feminist memory… Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings.”

I place the roof on my home while I piece together the magazine cuttings and make new friends at the Q***r Migrations Collaging Workshop at this July. ‘Maps’ (2026) is an ode to friendship across borders. Through automatist collage techniques I unearth how inhabiting fleeting spaces is a magical collective experience. My double heritage often leaves me feeling incomplete, but in these moments I remember how many hands and hearts have come before me.

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***rart

21/09/2026

“a paradise inhabited by devils” - so is the saying given to Naples, a cultural crossroad steeped in chaos and charm. From Padova to Ischia, Dante’s distinct vision of nine concentric circles of hell accompanies me on my travels, tightening upon me like some sort of boa constrictor.

“Schio! Schio!”

They are the superstitious type here. Suits me just fine. Amulets and talismans, offerings and feline friends, the clench becomes tighter. Lurking in Giotto’s 14th century frescos at the , light and dark dances in the form of a cannibalistic devil gorging against an eight-pointed starred indigo canopy ceiling - a cosmic battleground reminding us that salvation comes at a cost.

Piety and charity wrestle with common degradation, as twisted angels swoop down into the cramped alleyway abyss in Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro marvel at Pio Monte della Misericordia , straining to save us from our based urges. Jan Fabre punctures this baroque drama with hearts and doves strewn from gems of the sea. These coral sculptures, bathed in a ruddy red hue, provide both pleasure and pain - reminders of our mortality, ‘ex voto’ exemplified.

Meanwhile, video installation at Madre retells the story of a former island, which emerged between Sicily and Tunisia in 1831 due to a volcanic eruption, only to later become submerged again, cast to the annals of the past. Accompanied by a rich drum-heavy score by New York-based composer cc :) and poetry by Megan Fernandes, the film is saturated with melancholic affect. We mourn this lost moment - proof that nature is volatile and change is the only absolute. As I glide alongside Francesco Clemente Studio ‘s painterly, hurried thick fresco, Ave Ovo (2005), a tribute to his native city of Naples, I ponder how we cannot shy away from the dark. What would the brilliant white wings of Caravaggio’s angels be without the darkness that births them into our view? Later, at golden hour atop Castel d’St Elmo, the dormant beast resides in the background. Her peaks impose over the glistening asphalt and terracotta buildings. We keep our enemies closer.

29/07/2026

𝒬𝓊𝑒𝑒𝓇 𝒱𝒶𝓁𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝒶 - an unapologetically expressive, sensual and transgressive group show, bringing the intimate wide out into the public. Since opening at the Museo de la Ciutat Museo de la Ciudad de Valencia Valencia last month, there have been countless Prides, marches, and of course - the city’s own Gay Games celebrations, but it’s now, beyond the media spectacle, that the exhibition’s impact can truly be felt.

Take for instance, Anna Maria Staiano’s imposing metal chokehold, ‘Visible’ (2013) which horrors and delights, asserting its presence like some pulsing, breathing crinoline. An imposing structure of steel smothered in their own menstrual blood, Staiano imbues new life into historical instruments of oppression, transforming them into armour for women and gender nonconforming people to occupy space with. What at times is social scandal, and hidden from public sight, becomes a weapon for dismantling systems of power under the heteros*xual matrix.

Ascend the crimson staircase and Martin Kamén’s martin kámen buoyant bellowing mixed-media tapestry, ‘Q***r Collective Memorial’ (2025), arrests your gaze. Like an overloaded suitcase that’s burst open at the seams, personal remnants lie flung over the atlas backdrop - lace underwear, coded hankies, vinyl lacquered di**os and chintzy doilies - each a treasured textile belonging to the participants of Kamén’s collaborative piece. (Quite literally) stitched together, the flag becomes an ode to q***r community, beyond borders of space, time and generations.

And what to mark the exit than an entry point? While QFM ushers the public inside, we terminate the exhibition peeping through the kaleidoscopic love den, ‘Glory Hole (on the hanky code)’ (2026). A pearl-rimmed or***ce punctures diamonds of multicoloured handkerchiefs sewn together, spewing beads of paisley and glittering gold from its mouth. In this culminating work, Kamén rewrites what society renders abject - elevating non-normative forms of intimacy to divine proportions, and challenging the ways in which q***rness is often de-s*xualised to become more palatable.

On until 30.08.26

***rart

17/06/2026

A second life - I happen to pay a visit to Tracey Emin’s retrospective show at the Tate Modern as I remap my coordinates once again, re-routing to where it all began, amidst old friends ringing in their new arrivals, the hubbub of new life and action. What we have termed milestones, for their ability to jolt and unnerve the stagnant slumber that we sometimes find ourselves in (wicked comfort), disturbing our lives’ sleepwalking, is when we feel oh so very alive. Lust, loss, s*x, r**e, abortions, grief - Emin doesn’t shy from all that life might throw at us. Her lived experiences, both the beautiful and the brutal, are the subject matter of her work. Navigating her poetic testimonies, from pregnancy scares splayed in erratic shorthand to practical sage counsel for how to get an abortion, language which punctures the twee kaleidoscopic hanging blankets, we examine not personal confessions but examples constitutive of womxn’s lived experiences. Soaking in Emin’s hurried speech, at times bathed in crimson acrylic, other times, in bumpy warp and weft, lies what Clarice Lispector spurts as “The secret harmony of disharmony: I don’t want something already made but something still being tortuously made.” Like the title of the Ukrainian refugee and Brazilian writer’s 1973 anecdotal text, r, ‘Água Viva’, this show is living water. ‘I’m forced to the humility of personalising myself belittling myself but I am the are-you’, Lispector writes. Confronting Mad Tracey from Margate, I feel a kindred affinity, a universal cord binding us taut.

*xuality

17/05/2026

Does the sight of me make you squirm? Does it give you the creeps? Juliette Puch .puch and Gemma Saboritt make our hairs stand on end - ‘ponen los pelos de punta’ in their s*x positive, feminist s*x-worker-driven film takeover, ‘Pelos de Punta’, at Kubrick’s Korova Milkbar is served a kick in the teeth - or the balls! (spoiler alert of ‘s ‘Pikachu V. Piñera’) - as the duo lug a refrigerator from street to auditorium, reciting their manifesto of ‘preciosas pero precarias’. Like a pair of handymen hired to do the manual lifting in bejewelled corsets and dagger heels, their entry upsets the social borders cast between the private and public, the legible and illegible, questioning what forms of labour are considered palpable and worthy of public recognition. Documenting their work, they puncture the artifice of heteronormativity, as observed by Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant in their 1998 essay ‘Sex in Public’. Sinking back into the armchair, I devour the documentaries and cinematic shorts, from Fara Renaud’s .j.renaud touching, Greta Gerwin-esque ode to friendship, ‘Dyson’ to Juliette Puch’s .puch potent, pleasure-Domme, ‘Pussy Honey’ - my visceral reactions uncontained, they muddle in collective osmosis with the remaining audience’s. Exposing their lived experiences in a normative, public environment of the local cinema, the collective of artists and s*x workers, alongside researcher .ndreacorral.s legitimise what our society deems illicit or dissident, reminding us the borders we maintain are more porous than they seem.

*xpositive *xworkers feminism

15/05/2026

Where did it go?
Where’s my phone?
Where’s my phone?
Where did I leave?
Where’d I go?
Where’d I go?

The refrain of Mitski’s 2026 song Where’s my phone? loops round and around in my head. The 35-year-old Japanese-American pop-indie singer-songwriter summons the swerving dizziness and malaise of being a woman today. But this is not about regurgitating the worn sad girl trope, but rather sitting in the discomfort of the in-between. The discomfort, or what Brazilian-Ukrainian writer Clarice Lispector posits as, ‘darkness… where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth.’

Lured into it, I become, “Like a bug floating in the melted amber / Of a citronella candle”, as Mitski woos, or a single leaf, stained in chlorophyll, sliding amongst the dense canopy of Tania Candiani’s beating forest. I’ll find my refuge there between the periodic flashing lamps, oscillating spectres of light merging worlds together. Inspired by a Valencian book of botany, the Mexican artist’s installation at , titled Radix, musters the pages to life, allowing new dialogues to form through sound and light play; discomfort becoming a surrender to the deep green.

I take another sip. At the , the broth turns scalding, as I encounter the wolf pack, Yolanda Alba’s ‘jaurí’. After spending time with s*xually dissident and gender nonconforming communities in Mexico, the artist’s moving image assemblage of bodies nuzzling, howling and yelping together is celebration and reminder of acknowledging the primal within, and the rewards of processing trauma through collective caress.

Contemporary conditioning has rendered us privy to associating our pain and loneliness as a fixed entity, something contained within ourselves. Yet, I find affinity with the brutes and the microbes, the reverb of the forest, its warm hum, plunges me deeper into that darkness, still.

30/04/2026

Attention / Culpability /
Tension / Ex - tension / Restraint / Freedom /
Visibility / Erasure

Which lives float on the margins and which stories rise, elavated? Q***r Palestinian-German artist Mudar Al-Khufash summons these unsettling truths in a unique social experiment and performative-lecture ‘Dialectics of Erasure’

Arguably, recent changes in the consumption of news - reportage snipped into sound bites and palpable morsels of reels and clips - have accelerated our circulation and awareness of violence. Yet, to us, the sheltered Western spectator, conflict remains something that occurs ‘there’, away from ‘here’, coated in a synthetic skin of feeling propelled by media and press (Sontag 2004). Al-Khufash’s project, anchored in direct audience participation, summons us to look eye to eye at the insidious mechanisms of settler colonialism - a present constant, not a past event - as we become implicated in his work. Taking to the streets, bodies amassing in former sites of erasure - such as Ives Street in London, where Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali was assassinated in 1987 - ‘Dialectics of Erasure’ triggers us to think through feeling; a visceral literacy. For q***r people, this is felt even more strongly, as we have had to fight for our visibility in public spaces.

As Al-Khufash told me recently in an interview for , “I don’t want people to just intellectually think about what I’m saying, but to feel it viscerally. I want them to feel the information that I’m sharing with them. Hearing that really made me think that we are aiming forward.”

‘Dialectics of Erasure: Settler Colonialism in Three Acts’ brought together with
is showing at the Theatre Deli in London on the 1st and 2nd May 2026. Tickets are available on the website
Full Q&A available on now. Read by clicking the

Thinking Flesh

30/09/2026

21/09/2026

29/07/2026

17/06/2026

17/05/2026

15/05/2026

30/04/2026

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