CURATORIAL STATEMENT

“Queerlandia is a village, it is the Village, in its ideal form. Here, we like to imagine, anything is possible, and nothing bad can happen. But of course, we do not really live in Queerlandia” [Thom 53]. As Kai Cheng Thom writes in I hope we choose love, queer individuals more often than not are raised in homes and communities which are neglectful, unaccepting, and violent. It is no surprise then that LGBTQ2S+ communities tend not to know “how to look at each other through the lenses of love and justice at the same time” [Thom 53] when we are rarely looked at in such a way by those who raise us.

Queerlandia is a utopia. It is a place we can dream of and, through dreaming, manifest a better world for ourselves and our queer descendants. With this digital embodiment of a utopian world, we can dip our toes into a reality masquerading as fantasy. Queerlandia is an experience-based online exhibition which invites viewers to create, submit artwork, and chat with others on the ElitePalaces platform. The exhibition hosts a continuously evolving list of participants who submit artwork through the Queerlandia website. Once reviewed, these works will be added, in collaboration with artists, to various rooms of the platform for the public to see and interact with. Queerlandia contains work that considers identity, emotion, and love through digital figuration and multi-media forms. In Queerlandia, audio, video, drawings, and many more already exist as spaces to be occupied by viewers. The platform creates a pluralistic queer space for people to collaborate and converse with their own subjectivity and identity.

The exhibition asserts the use and contingencies of online spaces to foster connections and communication within marginalized communities. Nowadays, these communities are mediated and shaped by their existence in fringe spaces. ElitePalaces is run by a small team of people that retains its 1990s visual identity and is not commonly used by the mainstream. This visual identity harkens to the dawn of New Media art as a medium to foster new work without entrenched practitioners or an exhaustive history and paradigm. Online platforms commonly used by society are often run by massive corporations that grasp, exploit, and commodify the very concept of identity. ElitePalaces provides a fringe online space that elevates communities through its palace façade. The site uses the language of architecture as it refers to rooms and doors and the housing of an exalted person within a palace. Noting the absence of a traditional, physical exhibition space, Queerlandia engages with the architecture of online platforms and stationary digital transits to, from, and within the exhibition site.
Before entering Queerlandia, viewers are first met with the external website to learn about and gain access into the platform. Like the experience of driving into a physical exhibition, Queerlandia calls viewers to embark on a metaphysical experience of accessing and arriving at Queerlandia. This experience is chief in the transportation and translation of physicality into an online figuration of self. The site also contains the guide to submit work for installation in Queerlandia.

The viewers’ experience is guided by the ways in which they access the site. Varying screens, internet stability, and proficiency become personalized as one navigates through the different rooms of the site. The casual social environment of Queerlandia provides an open space and community to share and exist with other viewers of the exhibition. Queerlandia’s ever-expanding collection of artworks creates new spaces, always allowing room for greater participation. It should not be a competition or a battle to find space within the queer community, and Queerlandia asks participants to consider how this utopic cyber-zone might be reimagined IRL.

In addition to the exhibition, a selected reading list will be available online on the Queerlandia website. The reading list contains Kai Cheng Thom’s I hope we choose love, where the idea of Queerlandia originates, and provides insight into the mechanisms at work in the exhibition.