Over to Carlos to guide you through your Vogue-Chi activity, along with some suggested music to play: Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau, states: “Today, common perceptions of what it means to be or to become a man are increasingly questioned, especially for younger generations, who are confronted with these questions in a completely different way. The exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography offers a nuanced examination of masculinities in all their facets and shades. The works by over 50 international artists on view in the exhibition build a bridge from classical images of masculinity to gender-fluid identities, thus doing justice to a complex reality.” This plurality runs throughout the rest of the exhibition, which covers various aspects of masculinity. In the chapter titled ‘Too Close To Home: Family & Fatherhood’, we are presented with an early work by Hans Eijkelboom, With My Family (1973), in which he called on homes when the breadwinner was at work, and inserted himself into surrogate ‘family snaps’. In the same chapter, there is work from Masahisa Fukase, including moving images of physical decline in his lesser-known series, Memories of Father (published in 1991), and Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home (1992). Masculinities: Liberation through Photography explores the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed in photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. If you’re photographing yourself or someone else - be sure to make the other person feels comfortable and safe and that you have their consent.

Hierarchy Across many cultures throughout history, and continuing into the present moment throughout large parts of the world, gender functions as a hierarchy: some gender categories and gender expressions are granted higher value and more power than others. Men are often higher up the gender hierarchy than women, but the gender hierarchy is affected by racism, disablism, ageism, transphobia and other factors; in the West, men in their thirties are likely to be considered higher up the gender hierarchy than men in their eighties, for example.In contrast to the conventions of the traditional family portrait, the artists gathered in the third chapter, Too close to Home: Family and Fatherhood, set out to record the “messiness” of life, reflecting on misogyny, violence, sexuality, mortality, intimacy and unfolding family dramas, presenting a more complex and not always comfortable vision of fatherhood and masculinity. Patriarchy Literally ‘the rule of the father’, a patriarchy is a society or structure centred around male dominance and in which women (and those of other genders) are not treated as or considered equal. In defiance of the prejudice and legal constraints against homosexuality over the last century in Europe, the United States and beyond, the works presented in the forth chapter, Queering Masculinity, highlight how artists from the 1960s onwards have forged a new politically-charged queer aesthetic. The first British retrospective of Sunil Gupta’s work brings together material from across his long and varied career, from the scenes of everyday gay life in New York that he chronicled for his breakthrough series, Christopher Street , in 1976, to 2008’s elaborately constructed and highly symbolic vignettes, The New Pre-Raphaelites. “What does it mean to be a gay Indian man?” he has said of his photography. “This is the question that follows me around everywhere I go.” Read more. 4 Photoworks festival 2020 The U.K. capital’s infamous private boys’ clubs—which have produced many of the U.K.’s politicians—are depicted in 26 photographs by Karen Knorr. She shot the images in central London in the early 1980s at members-only, men-only spaces, and captioned them with snippets of overheard conversations, news reports, and government records. With their leather chesterfields and dark wood paneling—design elements that are common in other exclusive, male-dominated environments across Britain like private schools, Oxford University, and the Houses of Parliament—Knorr establishes an intriguing link between these hypermasculine environments, their architecture, and power.

Participating artists Bas Jan Ader, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Liz Johnson Artur, Knut Åsdam, Richard Avedon, Aneta Bartos, Richard Billingham, Cassils, Sam Contis, John Coplans, Jeremy Deller, Rineke Dijkstra, George Dureau, Thomas Dworzak, Hans Eijkelboom, Fouad Elkoury, Hal Fischer, Samuel Fosso, Anna Fox, Masahisa Fukase, Sunil Gupta, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani- Kayode, Karen Knorr, Deana Lawson, Hilary Lloyd, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Marlow, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Duane Michals, Tracey Moffatt, Andrew Moisey, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Catherine Opie, Elle Pérez, Herb Ritts, Kalen Na’il Roach, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Collier Schorr, Clare Strand, Mikhael Subotzky, Larry Sultan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hank Willis Thomas, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Weinberger, Marianne Wex, David Wojnarowicz and more. Rebekka Yallop is an artist and writer based in London who works with moving image and text, often exploring queer themes. They were part of the Barbican’s Young Visual Arts group in 2019 and is currently one of Chisenhale Studios’ 2020 Into the Wild artists. They continue to make work, most recently a collaborative queer fiction zine. Gender roles Specific cultural roles defined by the weight of gendered ideas, restrictions and traditions. Men and women are often expected, sometimes forced, to occupy oppositional gender roles: aggressor versus victim, protector versus nurturer and so on. Many gender roles are specific to intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion and disabled status – examples of these types of gender roles can be seen in the stereotypes of the Jezebel or the Dragon Lady.

Cosima Cobley Carr is a Barbican Young Creatives Alumni and an interdisciplinary artist, working in moving-image, collage and sound. Across different media, Cosi uses a collage method, bringing diverse elements from found and archival sources together with analogue and digitally created elements. Through their practice, Cosi explores issues related to social understanding, language-use and psychotherapy. Vogue-Chi facilitates a collection of vital tools historically developed by LGBTQ+ people to engage positively in life and overcome institutionalized oppression, invisibilization and abuse. Vogue-Chi was created by artists/dancers Carlos Maria Romero aka Atabey Mamasita & Ted Rogers in Margate, UK for people aged over 50. It has evolved organically into a multi-generational queer and allies safe space for self-expression and coming together. This autumn, the Gropius Bau presents Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, a comprehensive group exhibition that explores the diverse ways in which masculinity is experienced, performed and socially constructed through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. Presented across six sections, the exhibition grapples with masculinity in its expansive forms. The first chapter, Disrupting the Archetype, explores the representation of conventional and at times clichéd masculine subjects such as soldiers, cowboys, athletes, bullfighters, body builders and wrestlers. By reconfiguring the representation of traditional masculinity – loosely defined as an idealised, dominant heterosexual masculinity – the artists presented here challenge our ideas of these hypermasculine stereotypes. Since its invention photography has been a powerful vehicle for the construction and documentation of family narratives. In contrast to the conventions of the traditional family portrait, the artists gathered here deliberately set out to record the ‘messiness’ of life, reflecting on misogyny, violence, sexuality, mortality, intimacy and unfolding family dramas, presenting a more complex and not always comfortable vision of fatherhood and masculinity.

In the early 1970s pioneers of feminist art such as Laurie Anderson and Annette Messager consciously objectified the male body in a bid to expose the uncomfortable nature of the dominant male gaze. In contrast, filmmakers such as Tracey Moffatt and Hilary Lloyd turn the tables on male representations of desire to foreground the power of the female gaze. What comes to mind when you think of the word masculinity and yourself? Is it an item of clothing you often (or used to) wear? Is it an object related to your current or past relationships? Perhaps it's a part of your body (remember to keep it family friendly!)Normativity The process by which some groups of people, forms of expression and types of behaviour are classified according to a perceived standard of what is ‘normal’, ‘natural’, desirable and permissible in society. Inevitably, this process designates people, expressions and behaviours that do not fit these norms as abnormal, unnatural, undesirable and impermissible. Your object can be as serious or playful as you want it to be - perhaps you want to poke fun at the very concept of masculinity?