De Cinema will present a double bill showing No Skin of my Ass (1991) and Saint-Narcisus (2020), Bruce LaBruce will join for a talk. The party ALLE QUEERS IN DE NOR at De Nor (with DJ’s Bruce LaBruce, Jonathan Johnson & Stéphane Schraenen, and Daniël de Botanicus) will be the apotheosis of a week of Bruce LaBruce in Antwerp.

“When mounting a retrospective photography exhibit of my work, as I have done with FIXATIONS, certain motifs, patterns, and obsessions emerge. The body, or post-body, often naked and sexualized, worshipped and desecrated, comes to the fore. It's an obscure object of desire to be simultaneously adored and debased, blessed and blasphemed. The (post)body is often offered up in parts, a synecdochic tendency in the work that presents the limbs and appendages of subjects that have already been altered in real lifeamputated, removed, or alteredor cut off from the ancien regime body by the framing of the subject. An erect cock gloriously protruding from a glory hole is seemingly separated from the body behind the wall in order for it to be worshipped or, in a more violent imagination, severed. A close-up of a man's bare chest has been spunked upon by the artist, leaving only a trace of the artist's body and the sexual act he has performed for the viewer to contemplate. Similarly, a priest's face in close-up has been spunked upon, presumably by God, as he looks heavenward, the cock of the prime mover leaving only a remnant of its sexual manifestation. A subject whose arm has been amputated is photographed so that the top frame also cuts off his head, leaving only the transfigured body as love object. The transbody is ascendant, appearing frequently as a reminder of the mutability and malleability of the biological body. Blind subjectsa holy man with holy wafers covering his eyes, or a punk on a leash held by a nunare offered as symbols of either blind faith or castration, or as blind prophets, or as avatars of censorship. In every case, the intersection and interchangeability of religious and sexual ecstasy is made manifest (or womanifest). Fetish, which is the starting point for so many of my photographs and films (think the amputee fetishist in Hustler White, the gerontophile in Gerontophilia, or the twincest of Saint-Narcisse) is an act of both divine reverence and devilish profanity.

The exhibit is presented in both microcosm and macrocosm. Two blown up photographs cover two of the walls of the gallerythe glory hole cock, and the photograph of artist Slava Mogutin, shot from below, making him appear as if a giant, the photographer obviously genuflecting before the objectified subject. Both images offer only parts of the whole, but in their epic proportion they expand the body in a gesture of macrophilia, a new genre of pornography, the fetish for the gigantic. The remaining space in the gallery is covered by wallpaper composed of small reproductions of my photographs taken over the last three decades or so, the images repeated over and over again as they might be consumed on social media, reconfigured as a disposable medium of home decor. A selection of seven photographs have been framed and mounted on top of the wallpaper as they might be in a living room or more traditional gallery, merging the contemporary maximalization of imagery evinced by the wallpaper with the more traditional presentation of art as object to be bought and sold.

The rest of the show belongs to my longtime collaborator, the Hamburg-based jeweler and artist Jonathan Johnson, with whom I produce a collaborative line of jewelry, his work riffing on themes and motifs present in my work in his own inimitable style.”    (Bruce LaBruce)