Image: John Hansard Gallery, Southampton
John Hansard Gallery presents ‘New Ceremonies’ from 24 October 2026 to 9 January 2027, an exhibition exploring trans identities, colonial social relations and embodied community-building, curated by Louise Siddons.
The exhibition features newly commissioned and recent work by Mal Parry, Bean Yazzie and Siddons, bringing together their distinct artistic practices. ‘New Ceremonies’ looks beyond the remedial impulse in contemporary art and beyond the gaps, failures and violences embedded within archives to consider what exists outside archival limits, asking how the archive might inspire positive futurities while seeking queer joy.
Across installation, photography, print, audio, performance artefacts, sculpture and writing, the exhibition foregrounds lived experience and collective knowledge as vital forms of expansive archival practice.
Initiated in collaboration with Siddons in 2019, the project grounded Yazzie’s return to the Navajo Nation in an exploration of Indigenous, queer and transmasculine k’e, or kinship.
Through intimate conversations, collaborative portrait-making and their own powwow dancing, Yazzie constructs a living archive that resists colonial frameworks and binary gender systems, foregrounding the complexity and specificity of Diné experiences.
