It is so heartwarming to see all the attention still given to celebrate the life and work of the celebrated queer activist, filmmaker, and artist DEREK JARMAN who died of AIDS in 1994.  Earlier this month Queerguru’s Ris Fatah gave a ☆☆☆☆☆ review to MARK FARRELLYs tour-de-force performance in his one-man play JARMAN.

We also wrote about filmmaker Marco Alessi’s short documentary Saintmaking for The Guardian which covered when the London Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence canonized Derek Jarman.

Last Fall the first exhibition in France of the work of the  Jarman “Dead Souls Whisper (1986-1993)” was mounted by the  Festival d’Automne à Paris. and it was accompanied by the screening of his films at Cinéma d’Ivry-Le Luxy.

Now it’s the turn of Manchester Art Gallery in the UK to exhibit PROTEST!  a major retrospective of Jarman’s work. The exhibition focuses on the diverse strands of Jarman’s practice as a painter, filmmaker, writer, set-designer, gardener and political activist. This is the first time that all of these strands of his practice will be brought together in over 20 years.

PROTEST! captures Jarman’s engagement with both art and society, as well as his contemporary concerns with political protest and personal freedoms arising from the AIDS crisis. Major bodies of work, from the 1960s to the 1990s, have been brought together; many of which have never been seen in public before.

DEREK JARMAN : PROTEST
until Sunday 10 April 2022
Free, no need to book

https://manchesterartgallery.org/