The main galleries are closed until September 14th for de-installation, but the lobby of the Leslie-Lohman is still open for visitors and is currently presenting Schreber is a Woman, a video installation by the Spanish artist collective El Palomar (Mariokissme and R. Marcos Mota).

Schreber is a Woman is a meditation on queer and trans history through the figure of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a German judge committed to a psychiatric institution in 1894. While in confinement, Schreber experienced visions and heard voices as he reflected on cosmology, sexuality, religion, and a consuming desire for gender transformation, believing it to be divinely orchestrated.

Through performance, set construction, and an electronic, dance-inflected soundtrack, El Palomar presents a contemporary envisioning of Schreber’s rich inner world from a transfeminist perspective. Made during the social isolation of the early Covid-19 pandemic, the installation recuperates, for our present moment, the historic struggles for bodily autonomy, self-determination, and joy.

Our main galleries will re-open on September 14th for INDECENCIA.

INDECENCIA brings together a cohort of queer/rare* artists from Latin America and/or of Latin American descent and living in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean or in-between spaces/identities, whose praxes center on performance art and ephemeral actions. From the perspective of several generations, countries, and sociopolitical contexts, these artists invite us to consider Latinidad/Latinxidad and its relationship to religion, enfleshment, and sexuality. Their inquiries extend—through videos, props, scripts, costumes, and other channels—to the disjointed corpus of an entire hemisphere where, for many, the colonized and the colonizer can easily wrestle within a single body. This exhibition is curated by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles.

*“Raro” is the curator’s translation of “queer” in Spanish. “Raro” means strange, weird, or unusual.