This exhibition brings the problem of gender to the forefront and exposes its entrenched performative qualities through a multitude of different media and voices from all over the world. Although increasingly progressive in some parts of the globe, attitudes toward gender and sexuality in society have always been way behind art, which has been developing form as early as ancient Greece.
Kiss My Genders incorporates both the old and the new alike. The earliest artist on display is French Surrealist painter and photographer Pierre Molinier, who began his career in 1900. His monochrome photographs and photomontages approach queer fetishism as “the most profound moments of life”. The combination of pain and pleasure in his images reflected these two elements in his own life as a gay transsexual in the early 20th century. Being who he really was was a pleasure, but due to this, he was subsequently inflicted with a tantamount of pain by a society that refused to accept him.