Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts

The archive has long been theorized as a structuring force that informs public memory, state narratives, and the making of official history. When trans and queer histories enter the archive, the conditions upon which they are absorbed are often those of surveillance, criminalization, coloniality, and degradation. More commonly, however, these histories do not make their way into official archives at all, which leads to a fragmented remembering of queer and trans pasts.

Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts grapples with the absences, erasures, and censorships that colour the queer and trans archive, seeking forms of documentation, storytelling, and memory-keeping that serve marginalized communities. Responding to the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2023–24 research theme Absence, this exhibition interrogates the gaps that puncture the queer and trans archive, making visible their political nature and proposing strategies for a future of queer and trans history-making that refuses the lens of the oppressor. Through fiction-making, critical imagining, and revisionism, the artists in Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts gesture at and supplement histories of queer and trans people that are insufficient, compromised, colonial, or simply absent.