SEAS (Socially Engaged Art Salon) present their Queer/in/g Nature Exhibition

SEAS (Socially Engaged Art Salon) in Brighton, UK is an award-winning artist-led organization that promotes socially engaged art practices and artists from underrepresented sectors and works with marginalized communities through exhibitions, workshops, and cultural events. It also offers an artists’ support program and residencies.

Its latest project is Queer/in/g Nature, curated by Dr Gil Mualem-Doron, SEAS’s creative director,  is a group exhibition of LGBTQ+ artists, depicts provocative negotiations with the natural world, with the Western and heteronormative concepts of “nature” or “the natural”, and the environmental crisis.

The exhibition, at the Ledward Centre is part of the Brighton Festival. The exhibition includes photography, short films, digital art, documentation of queer interventions in the countryside and a large-scale immersive room installation.

SEAS statement reads The participating artists do not subscribe to the dichotomy of Nature/Artificial and shy away from heteronormative ideas of LGBTQ+ identities as artificial and alien to the natural world. Some of the work in the exhibition critiques the Western quantification and standardization of bodies which historically has led to commodification and even to genocides.

The countryside is used by some of the artists as a place to escape prescribed identities and acceptable codes of behavior. Other artists use bodies, rituals and other physical interventions to connect to the queer nature of Nature.