Page presents Gaby Sahhar, the New York debut of the London-based artist. Released explores alternative forms of knowledge-making through queer shapeshifting. Soaked in a kaleidoscopic palette of India and alcohol ink, Sahhar’s new works draw on processes of articulation within LGBTQI+ communities that resist academic domination. Such tools of thought migrate across borders, slipping into the pores of the public sphere, shifting into a collective body.
The central mural of the exhibition, Released, is a landscape composed using archival protest images. These are sourced from The Center in New York, The Museum of Youth Culture in London, and Museu da Diversidade Sexual in São Paulo. Historically imagined as a threat to society, the queer body here is re-marked as a vessel for movement. It permeates ungoverned; it refuses processes of naming; it is a vehicle for progress and joy. A visual researcher, Sahhar attests to the political weight of reconfiguring archives—of resisting the matrix of assimilation that labels and definition afford. Opposite the mural sits an ovate figure captured in oil paint. Restricted in form, this interlocutor is alien to the world around them. As their surroundings slip into conservatism and contemporary chaos, they must find new tools to articulate their experience, queering frameworks of thought.
