DS Galerie is delighted and proud to present the group show “A QUEER GARDEN”, bringing together artists Bayo Álvaro, Arda Asena, Guillaume Aubry, Andrés Barón, Clément Bataille, Claude Eigan, Tom Hallet, Vir Andres Hera, Derek Jarman, Youri Johnson, Mar Pérez and Leïla Vilmouth.

“The garden is a territory of resistance in that it refuses to be permanently fixed; it offers queer identities a terrain where shifting subjectivities unfold, where a lexicon in perpetual reinvention is constructed. A place of shifting forms, of sometimes uncontrolled creation, often deliberately left to its own devices, notably at Prospect Cottage. That one was an ode to colour, to effusion, and that’s what this ‘Queer Garden’ can be too. An arrival of a flamboyance of garden space that attempts to thwart attempts to erect bushes. The fantasy of this garden is an inspiration to create gardens without paths, with colours that don’t merge, but spring forth without constraint and express desires, desires and follies.
Videos, installations, paintings, performances and sculptures do not simply represent the garden, but extend its logic: they cultivate ambiguity, thwart binarisms, and are rooted in a materiality that questions modes of production and perception of the world.In this sense, they extend the thinking of Monique Wittig, who wrote that “lesbians are not women”: a phrase that, far from being a simple provocation, draws a loophole in the categories of gender, and proposes an escape from the heteropatriarchal system. The artists in this exhibition translate this idea into the language of the living: they see the garden not as a fixed representation, but as a stage on which identity assignments are replayed and subverted. The queer garden is not just a place of refuge: it is also a laboratory where possible futures are invented.”