Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo

I am a London-based art historian, curator and editor specialising in twentieth-century photography, artists’ moving image and performance with a particular interest in the intersections of art practice, identity and spatial politics. Drawing on theoretical insights to reappraise the archive, much of my present writing circulates around LGBTQ+ artmaking and the presence of queer and trans life in public culture, social movements and historical paradigms. My curatorial practice extends these concerns through an interest in activating transgenerational engagements with archives, material and form.

I am currently working on two projects, the first an exploration of the writing of queer and trans visual cultures in the context of photography’s relationship to policing in Britain since the 1920s and the second a monograph which takes a non-exceptionalising look at ecological art and activism after 1960 to consider what can be learned from shared moments of activation, connection and commiseration.

As a curator of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022, I co-curated the exhibition, Currency: Photography Beyond Capture at Deichtorhallen—Halle für aktuelle Kunst, Hamburg alongside Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, and acted as commissioning editor for Allegories of the Visible, publishing new writing on photography throughout 2021–22. For 2022, I am a guest curator at Country SALTS, Bennwil, Baselland and a member of the Emerging Curators Network (Paul Mellon Centre/Tate). Other curatorial projects I have contributed to include Dig Where You Stand, an exhibition-within-an-exhibition for the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh that responded to the museum’s collections (2018–19), ZEITSPUREN: The Power of Now, an exhibition that brought together works around an exploration of time and contemporaneity at Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel (2018), and ATARAXIA, a four-part series organised by Salon Suisse for the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).

I hold a PhD in Art History at UCL, where I wrote a thesis on a history of ecological affects in contemporary visual art relating to queer and feminist artistic engagements with environmental and spatial contexts. The project developed a queer ecocritical approach to address how social norms undergird political movements and to uncover unique aesthetic approaches that enrich and challenge the historiography of art about ecological crisis. Mapping key coordinates between queer and trans, critical race and ecocritical methodologies, ideas and conceptual forms across key points in their contemporary development, this research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Terra Foundation for American Art and supported in an IPS fellowship at the Huntington Library in 2020.

My writing and criticism has appeared in Another Gaze, Map Magazine, König Magazine and Sculpture Journal, as well as publications Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image (Hatje Cantz, 2022), I Have Grown Taller From Standing with Trees (Copenhagen Contemporary, 2019) and Dispatch (Dancing Foxes Press, 2019).