OVER THE RAINBOW : a stunning exhibit of key queer art at Pompidou Centre, Paris

OVER THE  RAINBOW is a stunning new Exhibit of queer art at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition brings together more than five hundred artworks and documents and sets out to show how, since the beginning of the twentieth century, artists have contributed to transforming the representation of so-called “minority” sexualities and have participated in the struggles of LGBTQIA+ communities for recognition of their rights.

Far from presenting a one-dimensional narrative, “Over the Rainbow” demonstrates a constellation of diverse artworks whose common feature is that each in its own way affirms what homophobic representation denigrates. The works presented are rooted in an eminently social dimension, mainly in disciplines of mechanical reproduction, such as film and printed matter, the only ones likely to provide broad dissemination. The collections of the Kandinsky Library are thus largely solicited: thanks to the institutional support of Gilead Sciences, they have recently been enriched with several hundred items – illustrated books, photographs, reviews and queer zines – forming a vast archive of LGBTQIA+ visual culture from the 20^th and 21^st centuries. 

The exhibition presents a series of ensembles based on the Centre Pompidou’s extensive queer collection: Natalie Clifford Barney’s lesbian salon, the scene of artistic fermentation of alternative thought at the intersection of disciplines; the homoerotic work of Jean Cocteau, the author after André Gide of one of the first militant literary works, Le Livre blanc (The White Notebook, 1928); between-the-wars photography, a medium favoured by Florence Henri and Raymond Voinquel for the expression of homosexual desire; the theatre of inversion in Paris in the Roaring Twenties, when genders blurred or switched in the eye of Brassaï or Gerda Wegener; the “black homosexuality” of Jean Genet in Querelle de Brest (Querelle of Brest, 1947) and Un chant d’amour (A Song of Love, 1950); the emergence of leather culture in the late 1960s with Kenneth Anger and Nancy Grossman; the graphic and video productions of 1970s activism around the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR, Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action); the response of anti-AIDS artist collectives like Boy / Girl with Arms Akimbo to the inaction, even denial, of the authorities; the assertion of queer theory in the 1990s and the development of contemporary art forms that blend questions of gender, ethnic origin and/or social class with questions of sexuality.

Now is the perfect time to plan a visit as traditionally Parisians flee the city for August making it so much easier for us ‘foreigners’ to enjoy the the city of angels without the crowds.