Some Faggy Gestures

Since the mid-1990s, Henrik Olesen has used media such as collage, sculpture, and minimalistic spatial intervention to investigate the social construction of identity and its historiography. Through the appropriation of source images and contextual shifts not dissimilar to the method invented by Aby Warburg for his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” Olesen probes the associations between homosexuality and its criminalization in the past, as well as in the present. His archival work sheds light on the enduring existence of spaces for Others, and inscribes homosexual subculture once more into the history of art and culture.