1992, New York), a performer and figure of the Stonewall uprising for gay rights in 1969 who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with Sylvia Rivera (b. These are interspersed with archival footage of the memorial of Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson (b. It begins with similar shots of Tourmaline walking through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Edwardian period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. The film Pollinator opens like an “upward spiral,” to quote the artist. While these places were categorised as “white-only” (to quote racist advertisements of the time), a few were Black-owned and stood as havens of leisure and resistance. Evoking the relations between nature and ornament, but also the representation and visibility of queer and Black bodies, this series pursues the artist’s explorations of the history of “pleasure gardens”-leisure spaces that emerged in the United States in the early 1800s. Leir Pavilion with a set of four photographs as a prologue to the film that is screened in its lower floor, where we see the artist dressed in costumes inspired by early twentieth-century attire. In most photographs, she stands majestically in a garden, while in others, she is almost camouflaged amidst the large swaths of her dress’s white fabric and plant leaves. The exhibition begins in the Mudam Henry J. Pleasure and Pollinator is the first solo presentation of Tourmaline’s work in a European institution and is centred around the video Pollinator (2022), which won the Baloise Prize and was donated to Mudam by the Baloise group. Her work is nourished by historical research, critical theory and fiction to show how erasure and amnesia have marked the writing of a hegemonic historical canon. Tourmaline uses found footage and archival material in her films for their empowering potential: giving political agency to those affected by the afterlife of slavery and tracing an imagined genealogy of Black queer figures, of which Tourmaline is an integral part.
Tourmaline is an artist, writer and transgender activist whose video and photographs create elaborately staged scenes honouring living and historical figures of LGBTQI+ movements and queer culture.
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