Drag: Self-Portraits and Body Politics


Interesting exhibition at the Hayward Gallery looking at contemporary artists who have used drag to explore or question gender and identity through self-portraiture.

The show took quite a broad definition of drag seeing it as much as dressing up in general not just cross dressing. Cindy Sherman’s series of identity card photos explores aging rather than gender.

I did like Michael Journiac’s “24 Hours in the Life of an Ordinary Woman” where he enacted scenes from a typical woman’s day based on a survey from a woman’s magazine. It was lovely to see a couple of Robert Mapplethorpe self-portraits with him in partial drag.

However I am going to have my usual moan about video art! There was a bank of screens showing films with headphones. They were popular so you were queuing to get onto them and if you had watched them all you would have been there for over 2 hours!

Closed on 14 October 2018.

Review
Guardian



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