New Ceremonies

Featuring newly commissioned and recent work by Mal Parry, Bean Yazzie, and Siddons, the exhibition brings together their distinct artistic practices to reveal their shared commitment to reaching beyond the gaps, failures, and violences embedded within archives to find queer joy. New Ceremonies looks beyond the remedial impulse in contemporary art to consider what exists outside and beyond archival limits. How does the archive inspire positive futurities? Across installation, photography, print, audio, performance artefacts, sculpture, and writing, New Ceremonies foregrounds lived experience and collective knowledge as vital forms of expansive archival practice. Mal Parry has been commissioned by John Hansard Gallery to create a new body of work for the exhibition. A transgender, transdisciplinary artist working across scenography, performance, drag, and visual art, Parry’s practice moves fluidly between genres and contexts — from theatre and opera to club and community spaces. Drawing on their experience in archival installation, costume design, and socially engaged practice, Parry’s new work refigures archival knowledge about Joan of Arc and Eleanor Rykener through performative and ritualised practices of making that reveal identity as process. Louise Siddons’ newest body of work makes visible the intangible, embodied archive contained within queer dancers past and present. The work in New Ceremonies foregrounds collaboration and process, creating space for shared forms of meaning-making while refusing the impulse to render queer bodies as spectacle. Centred on dance and movement, Siddons’ contribution draws on her extensive background in historic Anglo-American social dance traditions, using choreographic structures and embodied participation to activate the pervasive queerness of this archive and invite audiences into its living, moving histories. Bean Yazzie’s contribution builds on The Dilbaa Project, an ongoing series of photographic and audio portraits of queer Diné (Navajo) women, transmasculine, and nonbinary people and their families. Initiated in collaboration with Siddons in 2019, the project grounded Yazzie’s return to the Navajo Nation in an exploration of Indigenous, queer, and transmasculine k’e (kinship). Through intimate conversations, collaborative portrait-making, and their own powwow dancing, Yazzie constructs a living archive that resists colonial frameworks and binary gender systems, foregrounding the complexity and specificity of Diné experiences. New Ceremonies articulates a speculative and intersectional visual politics of futurity by reaching into and then beyond archives to offer a multifaceted vision of what can happen when we use creative practice to transcend their absences and historical erasures.