Abstract

Throughout 2017, cultural institutions across England and Wales marked the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of sex between men. In this article I explore two projects about public sex and queer space developed in London that year by two contemporary queer artists: Liz Rosenfeld and Prem Sahib. Both employ queer approaches to preservation and archival labour in the face of imminent material erasure, particularly the loss of dedicated queer cultural spaces as a consequence of gentrification, and exhibit a queer disengagement with the public forms of commemoration enacted that year. I consider how Rosenfeld and Sahib’s work from 2017, which casts endemic gendered and racialising practices of exclusion and denial in sharp relief, imbues the practices of preservation and archiving with an erotic complexity and an embodied and radical urgency that underscores the precarity of queer spaces and queer archives in contemporary Britain.

摘要

在整个2017年，英格兰和威尔士各地的文化机构都纪念了男性之间部分性非刑事化的五十周年。在本文中，我探讨了两位当代酷儿艺术家Liz Rosenfeld和Prem Sahib在当年在伦敦开发的两个有关公共性和酷儿空间的项目。面对即将到来的物质擦除，特别是由于中产阶级化而丧失专用的酷儿文化空间，两者都采用酷儿的方法来保存和存档工作，并且与当年制定的公共纪念形式格格不入。我考虑罗森菲尔德（Rosenfeld）和萨希布（Sahib）从2017年开始的工作，该工作以特有的性别歧视和种族歧视的方式在排斥和拒绝中表现出排斥性和否认性，