The exhibition “Being Queer,” open since September 30 and until October 31, in partnership with the 20th L’Image Satellite Festival, welcomes a good number of visitors. In the gallery, the studio seems literally divided into two worlds, forming a universe imagined by professional photographers Tim Aspert and Maxime Michelet.
Two worlds represented in photos. Inside the Uni-Vers-Photos gallery, many frames are displayed on the left. Most of them show people of African origin. These are photos taken from Johannesburg (South Africa). On the other side of the room, a series of portraits featuring Angela, a Brazilian trans woman who has been living in France for six years.
Michelet, the “queer heavenly bodies”
On the side of Maxime Michelet’s photographic works, a series of frames representing the bodies of so-called “queer” individuals. In other words, these are South African people whose sexual orientation does not conform to dominant models. A genre that blends expression and gender identity.
Here, queerness is on display through participants who are nude, or nearly so, photographed by Mr. Michelet, who could not be present at the gallery tonight. The participants of Queer Heavenly Bodies, shown in the frames, tell stories of occupying a space through the experience of sexual and gender minorities in the world.
A project initially commissioned by the South African LGBTI journalist, artist, and activist Zane Lelo Meslani (*Faculty Press*), a collection of visual initiatives from contemporary South Africa, supported by fashion designer Thebe Magugu.
Aspert, “being Angela”
Opposite, visitors contemplate numerous portraits displayed to form a large rectangle. Portraits of a single person, Angela, a woman of Brazilian origin. From one end of the corridor to the other, the visitor begins and follows a story depicting Angela’s childhood and adult life.
Thanks to the small dialogues printed at the bottom of the photos in which Angela expresses herself in the first person, one can imagine being in the presence of the Brazilian woman who tells us herself about her life experience as a “prisoner of the wrong body.”
It becomes clear that the term identity can take on various forms: administrative, social, profound, gender… Since a young age, Angela has fought to shed her deep identity and finally be recognized as a woman. Considered transgender by society, her documents attribute a male identity to her.
With this thought-provoking project, Tim Aspert, who is celebrating his 33rd birthday this Saturday, has carried out a true professional photographic work that questions the freedom to be.
