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CRUISING GROUND

1 July, 2017
– 2 September, 2017

LUX Summer Programme
In collaboration with CRUSEV

CRUISING GROUND is a summer-long programme of writing, exhibition, screenings, workshops and events bringing together a range of perspectives and discourses on cruising. Engaging with the 50th anniversary of the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 and the geographical and cultural landscape of LUX’s new location in North London, CRUISING GROUND takes the ponds and cruising areas of neighbouring Hampstead Heath as a departure point for the programme.

An exhibition of Turner Prize 2017 nominee artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s Jack Straw’s Castle will be presented at LUX from 16 July – 2 Sep. The film takes its name from a now-converted pub on the edge of the West Heath, and is partly filmed in the cruising areas that stretch out behind it. Combining footage shot from real-life with more highly staged scenarios revealing the constructs and performance of filmmaking, Jack Straw’s Castle acts as an anchor for the programme, extrapolating the performance, behaviours and modes of cruising beyond the site of the cruising area.

Alongside the exhibition a series of public events has been developed 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. Many of the events and a series of blog posts in the writing section of the LUX website provide a public access point to some of the cross-disciplinary research undertaken by CRUSEV over the past year.

Drawing on the many discourses presented across the season, CRUISING GROUND also acts as its own research project; proposing the methodologies of cruising for LUX (and within the arts more broadly) as a strategy for permanent institutional destabilisation and for queering cultural mediation and production. The accompanying display of moving image works, texts and ephemera in the LUX Library and online will expand on some of these ideas and research.

The full programme of events will be announced online and updated over the coming weeks. Five new research blogs from CRUSEV contributors will be published online at lux.org.uk/writing over the Summer, beginning at the start of July.

CRUISING GROUND is programmed by Matt Carter with CRUSEV.


Programme

24 July, at LUX, 7pm – 9pm
COMPANIONS
Liz Rosenfeld will presents a new film work entitled, Fuck Tree (2017), as a companion piece to Luther Price’s 1989 work Sodom. Following the screening Liz Rosenfeld will be in conversation with Performer/ Producer/ Lecturer R Justin Hunt.
£5, book through Eventbrite.

13 August, at LUX, 11am – 5pm
CRUISING THE PAST, workshop with Fiona Anderson and Laura Guy
A one-day workshop exploring cruising as a method for tracing the queer past and surviving in the present and future, drawing on Fiona Anderson and Laura Guy’s research into pre-HIV/AIDS queer social and sexual cultures, regeneration, and community building in the 1970s.
Free, booking required through Eventbrite.

17 August, at LUX, 7pm – 9pm
Rosalind Nashashibi and Irene Revell in conversation
On the occasion of her solo exhibition at LUX, Rosalind Nashashibi – Jack Straw’s Castle, Rosalind Nashashibi will be in conversation with Irene Revell.
£5, book through Eventbrite.

22 August, at LUX, 7pm – 9pm
CRUISING COMMUNITY: Derek Jarman and Hampstead Heath
Dr Richard Maguire explores filmmaker Derek Jarman’s love of Hampstead Heath and the importance of the cruising grounds as social sites, beyond simply a place for sexual encounter, in an evening of short films, guest speakers and poetry performance.
£5, book through Eventbrite.

30 August, at LUX, 7.30pm – 11pm
CRUISING IN MOVING IMAGE: Stranger by the Lake with Gary Needham
LUX presents an outdoor screening of Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 feature Stranger By The Lake, a French drama-thriller set in the cruising grounds around a lake in the height of summer. The screening will be accompanied by an introductory talk from Gary Needham.
£5, book through Eventbrite.

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.
https://www.crusev.ed.ac.uk

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