Culturele Zondag: Buiten de Lijnen

Culturele Zondag: Buiten de Lijnen offers a diverse program at five different locations in Utrecht.

The program at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst revolves around themes of identity and finding/belonging to a community. Queer Arcana invites you behind the scenes as they transform into their drag persona. Zhou Jinxiao has made a performance about his ‘Asian-queerness’ and Kaylie Kist questions what it means to live in the Netherlands as a non-native.

The program is free to visit at BAK between 12.00–17.30 hrs, and includes admission to the exhibition The Hauntologists, which can be visited until 19.00 hrs. 

12:00–17:00: NL-HaNA_2.02.01_6056A_01 / Return to Sender
Embroidered sleeping bag with sound piece and video installation, Kylie Kist

Kaylie’s work plays with the inaccessibility of the 1815 Dutch Constitution stored in the National Archive, replicating both its title and book cover in the form of a sleeping bag. The accompanying sound piece is composed of vocal fragments of those participating in discussions in relation to Article 1. of the Dutch Constitution. In the accompanying video, Return to Sender, Kist begins to explore how Article 1, translates and unfolds in both personal and political urgencies when considering equality and discrimination. She tries to navigate her position and understanding through the re-writing of a letter, returning to herself, the sender. Providing a commentary on her changing ideas, she relates personal narratives, raising questions about what it means to be living in the Netherlands as a non-native, confronting the Dutch constitution as a form of artistic research. 

13:00–15:00: The Art of Loving Our Selves 
Two lecture performances, Zhou Jinxiao
Part 1: (Un)Learn the Intersectional Shame (20 mins)
Part 2: (Un)Learn to Love (25 mins)
(exact performance times TBC)

Through performance, Zhou Jinxiao aims to create a safe space to practice embodied forms of (un)learning and explore self-love: the act of loving one’s self. In his performances, Zhou takes an intersectional approach to uncover and understand underlying affections, such as the shame experienced by a non-heterosexual man, his crisis of identity. The artist explores how oppressive power structures rooted in history—coloniality, capitalism and politics—have constructed an emotional framework one is forced to experience while searching for one’s sexual self, including a perpetual sense of shame. In his performative work The Art of Loving Our Selves, Zhou unfolds a multiplicity of selves that allows queer affections to flow, opening up a pathway to communicate with our selves and gain a deeper understanding of who we are. At the same time, the practice of self-love uncovers and challenges the visible and invisible suppressions non-heterosexual men experience on a daily basis. 

16:00–17:30: Queer Arcana 
A ‘non-binary drag lecture’

In this talk from Queer Arcana, we learn how fantasy avatars mean a lot to non-binary gamers and non-binary people in the drag community. What do these groups have in common?

The lecture will discuss how for Lars Reen, Sasa Hara, Derk Over, and many other non-binary drag performers, fantasy pop culture has contributed a lot to the development of the aesthetic and cultural evolution of their non-binary drag characters and how they, partly through fantasy pop culture, understand their queerness in everyday life. Queer Arcana also zoom in on the recent resurgence of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and how many queer gamers are using these roleplaying games as tools to test new identities and expressions in a safe fictional environment.