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BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY: TREES ARE FAGS
CRUISING GROUND New Work Commission Launch and Artist Discussion

11 May, 2018
– 11 May, 2018
7pm-8pm
LUX
Waterlow Park Centre
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Trees Are Fags, 2018

As part of ​CRUISING GROUND,​ LUX and CRUSEV have commissioned artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay to produce a new work in response to some of the ideas and themes explored during the past year of programming and research. ​TREES ARE FAGS​ will take the form of an audioguide combining narrated passages and a score of gestural cues, inviting the participant to apply the choreography and aesthetics of cruising to a walk in a park or forested area, or anywhere where trees are visible. The audioguide will be programmed to select and shuffle narrated and musical material, making the listening experience unique for each participant.

The work has also been developed in response to LUX’s geographical location and will become part of the LUX Collection, available on a number of devices that can be borrowed from the organisation’s space in Waterlow Park. In addition to these, the work will also be accessible on personal devices anywhere via the Internet and will therefore be translatable to any number of locations and sites – limited only by the audience’s imagination.

TREES ARE FAGS will be launched on Friday 11 May 2018, marking the end of the CRUISING GROUND II programme and the beginning the work’s existence in the public realm. LUX will reopen at 7pm with a discussion between Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, CRUSEV and LUX, which will be the first opportunity to listen to and participate in the new work. To continue the celebrations, Nemerofsky Ramsay has been invited to curate a special edition of the literary salon event Naked Boys Reading taking place straight after from 8:30pm: NAKED BOYS READING: CRUISING ADRIAN’S LIBRARY

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is an artist, diarist and correspondent. His artistic work mediates emotional encounters with musical, art historical and Queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. In his work you will find bells, bouquets, ceramic vases, enchanted forests, folding screens, gay elders, glitter, gold leaf, love letters, imaginary paintings, madrigals, megaphones, mirrors, naked men, sex-changing flowers, sign language, subtitles, and the voices of birds, boy sopranos, contraltos, countertenors, and sirens. Nemerofsky’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is part of the permanent collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Thielska Galleriet Stockholm and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. www.nemerofsky.ca

This event is part of CRUISING GROUND II (CGII) a public programme of exhibition, writing, workshop, performance and screenings at LUX April-May 2018, engaging with some of the different ideas explored in the ongoing research project CRUISING GROUND.
First initiated at LUX in Summer 2017 in response to the organisation’s relocation to Waterlow Park, Highgate  in North London, CRUISING GROUND takes the the ponds and cruising areas of neighbouring Hampstead Heath as a departure point for exploring the methodologies of cruising as a strategy for permanent institutional destabilisation and for queering cultural mediation and production within the arts.
CRUISING GROUND and CGII have been developed and curated by Matt Carter in collaboration with Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV), a three-year pan-Europe research project exploring LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future.

Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV) explores LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) social and sexual cultures of the 1970s, and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s, the decade before HIV/AIDS, to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future. The three-year research project is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme. www.crusev.ed.ac.uk // @cruisingthe70s

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