Tourmaline: Pleasure and Pollinator

Tourmaline is an artist, writer and transgender activist whose video and photographs create elaborately staged scenes honouring living and historical figures of LGBTQI+ movements and queer culture. Her work is nourished by historical research, critical theory and fiction to show how erasure and amnesia have marked the writing of a hegemonic historical canon. Tourmaline uses found footage and archival material in her films for their empowering potential: giving political agency to those affected by the afterlife of slavery and tracing an imagined genealogy of Black queer figures, of which Tourmaline is an integral part.

Pleasure and Pollinator is the first solo presentation of Tourmaline’s work in a European institution and is centred around the video Pollinator (2022), which won the Baloise Prize and was donated to Mudam by the Baloise group. The exhibition begins in the Mudam Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Pavilion with a set of four photographs as a prologue to the film that is screened in its lower floor, where we see the artist dressed in costumes inspired by early twentieth-century attire. In most photographs, she stands majestically in a garden, while in others, she is almost camouflaged amidst the large swaths of her dress’s white fabric and plant leaves. Evoking the relations between nature and ornament, but also the representation and visibility of queer and Black bodies, this series pursues the artist’s explorations of the history of “pleasure gardens”—leisure spaces that emerged in the United States in the early 1800s. While these places were categorised as “white-only” (to quote racist advertisements of the time), a few were Black-owned and stood as havens of leisure and resistance. 

The film Pollinator opens like an “upward spiral,” to quote the artist. It begins with similar shots of Tourmaline walking through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Edwardian period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. These are interspersed with archival footage of the memorial of Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson (b. 1945, Elizabeth, New Jersey–d. 1992, New York), a performer and figure of the Stonewall uprising for gay rights in 1969 who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with Sylvia Rivera (b. 1951–d. 2002, New York). While centring grief, this montage acts as a joyful reminder that Johnson was a nurturing figure for gender non-conforming and trans people in New York: she was, metaphorically speaking, a “pollinator.” Evoking queer grief, Tourmaline’s work nevertheless privileges a celebratory perspective that connects historical queer figures with contemporary Black transgender communities—an approach that recalls what historian Robin D.G. Kelley (b. 1962, New York) defines as “freedom dreaming.” 

​Curators: Marie-Noëlle Farcy, assisted by Line Ajan. 

Tourmaline (b. 1983, Roxbury, Massachusetts) has presented her work within significant survey exhibitions, such as the 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams (2022); Mountain/Time at the Aspen Art Museum (2022); The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2021) and Critical Fabulations at MoMA, New York (2021). Her work is part of numerous public collections, such as the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Tate Modern, London. Tourmaline was also granted the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. Together with Johanna Burton and Eric A. Stanley, she has co-edited the critical anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017). She lives and works in New York.

Tourmaline is the recipient of the 2022 Baloise Group Prize. Founded in 1999, the prize is awarded annually to two young artists in the “Statements” section of Art Basel. Tourmaline is the seventh artist to join the Mudam Collection thanks to the support of the Baloise Group since the museum became a partner of the prize in 2015.