THE NATIONAL GALLER
Sofia Arsenal – Museum for Contemporary Art
presents
Yevgeniy Fiks
Dictionary of the Queer International
Supported by the Pushkin House in London
Designer of the flags and the catalogue: Katya Sivers
Curator for Bulgaria: Nadezhda Dzhakova
17 March 2022 – 30 April 2022
Vernissage on Thursday, 17 March, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.,
observing all anti-epidemic measures and with controlled access
SAMCA, 2, Cherni Vrah Blvd., Sofia
Dictionary of the Queer International is an exhibition that stems from a book by the same name, edited by Yevgeniy Fiks and published by ArtsEverywhere and Publication Studio Guelph in 2020, which consists of words and phrases in local queer languages, including “Тематический” from Russia, “Beke” in the Philippines, “Polari” from the U.K. and “Pajuba” in Brazil.
In the iteration at Pushkin House in London, Fiks takes the Dictionary of the Queer International further and composes poems by mixing words and phrases from different local queer languages from around the world. Fiks’s queer internationalist poetry, presented as text on banners and designed by Katya Sivers, reimagines internationalism, evokes experiments in utopian language creation, and contributes to the queer critique of cultural imperialism and globalization.
The question of culture and language comes to the foreground more than ever at times of political uncertainty, as a form of cultural resistance to both hierarchical globalization and a nationalism of exclusion. In this current political and cultural situation, the Dictionary of the Queer International proposes a vision of international, intersectional, and non-hierarchical queer culture via the creation of an imaginary queer fusion-language.
The Dictionary of the Queer International proposes a vision of an international queer language of multi-locality and horizontality.
The exhibition is also imagined as a site of knowledge production for the revising of the Dictionary of the Queer International, Volume 1 and for the collection of content for the Dictionary of the Queer International, Volume 2.
Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. His personal projects include Pas de Trois, Tallinn City Gallery, Tallinn (2021); Mister Deviant, Comrade Degenerate, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ (2019); Mother Tongue Pushkin House and GRAD, London (2019), Optica Bronstein (with Pablo Helguera), The Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017), Andy Warhol and the Pittsburgh Labor Files, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2015); Monument to Cold War Victory (with Stamatina Gerogory), The Cooper Union, New York (2014); Homosexuality Is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America, Winkleman Gallery, New York; Communist Tour of MoMA (Performance), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012)] Modern Art Shackled to Communism, Galerie Sator, Paris (2012), among others. He also participated in numerous group exhibitions at various institutions, including Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), Postmasters Gallery (New York), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Museu Colecção Berardo (Lisbon), V-A-C Foundation (Venice), Calvert22 (London) and Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
Katya Sivers (b. 1979, Moscow) is an artist, designer and researcher. Her work has been presented at a vast number of exhibitions including Bi-City Shenzen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, 4th Industrial Ural Biennial, 4th Moscow Biennial. Sivers lives and works in London and Moscow.