Saints and Sinners

Guts Gallery is excited to present ‘Saints and Sinners,’ a group show of LGBTQIA+ identifying artists exploring what it means to be LGBTQIA+ in an age where we increasingly see the physical closure of safe spaces. 

Throughout history, LGBTQIA+ identifying artists have often been barred from seeing their lived experiences represented and recognised by arts institutions. Guts Gallery believes that art, like all things, should accurately reflect society. The work within ‘Saints and Sinners’ is disruptive - it actively forces viewers out of their comfort zones and forces them to engage with the historical and present-day societal injustices that LGBTQIA+ people have faced and continue to face every day.

‘Saints and Sinners’ is a celebration of LGBTQIA+ people. It seeks to recognise and platform LGBTQIA+ artists to foster community and a sense of unity. The artists in this show refuse to be silenced in the face of societal neglect and prejudice; instead, they have joined together to present themselves as brilliant, diverse and unique complex individuals that make up the foundations of the community. 

Through making, these artists are able to access unbridled self-expression and, in doing so, can resist and reject the heteronormative institutions of power that seek to suppress and erase those that don’t fit into its rigid structures and binary frameworks. The exhibition will take an intersectional lens, inviting artists, speakers and visitors alike, to open discourse on the prejudices creating barriers within the LGBTQIA+ community. 

“Although visibility helps redress a representational inequality, it does nothing on its own to achieve redistributive justice.” 

- Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice 

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones— do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.”

- Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Without community there is no liberation.”

- Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House