Gillian Wearing & Wolfgang Tillmans Transcript
The two works that I’ve chosen for the Saturday of Pride have an outside theme. Given what’s going on at the moment, with people not being able to congregate in great numbers, and Manchester Pride obviously being digital, I thought it would be quite appropriate to show these two works.
This work at the side of me is by Gillian Wearing, called ‘The Garden.’ In this work, Wearing is challenging peoples’ assumptions on women. Wearing asked three female presenting women to take part in the shot, two of them are cis and one of them is non-cis. The non-cis person likes to play with gender and is gender con-conforming. Wearing was quoted as saying: ‘We all start making up our minds when we see someone, we all get ideas based on how people look even though we know those ideas can be knocked out of us as soon as we get close to them or start talking to them.’
The artist’s conscious decision to capture the image in black and white, and only highlight the slogans on the women’s t-shirts, is once again the artist challenging those assumptions about woman and sexuality and identity. Our eyes are drawn to the colour on the t-shirts rather than the women themselves.
The second work which has an outside theme is ‘friends outside Planet’ by Wolfgang Tillmans, which was photographed in 1992. Tillmans became increasingly interested in the rave scene in Berlin, and was interested in the young people at that time making these spaces after the Berlin Wall had come down into creative spaces, into spaces that they could own, become political, take action within, and these photos of these friends that are outside a club is actually quite a political action as these young people are actually taking control of the politics of that time. Sick of the ideology of East and West, these people are actually becoming political within their clubbing, and this is what Tillmans is capturing within this photograph.
The photograph also captures a coming together of our friends, of three friends outside. Unfortunately, in Manchester at the moment that’s the only thing that we can do, so although it’s Saturday of Pride it does remind me of a coming together of friends.
Queering The Whitworth 