“I’ve always been obsessed with losing my memory because it’s something that runs in my family,” Mohamad Abdouni remarked last year. Long a driving force of his practice, photography has allowed him to excavate, reinvent, and remember queer histories in Arab cultures. Here Abdouni shifts view to his home region of Beqaa, Lebanon. In pulling apart family photo albums, subjecting them to the scrutiny of his loving but unsentimental gaze, the artist returns to his childhood navigations within the complex cultural norms of a heterosexual masculinity and male camaraderie that embody Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of “male homosocial desire” grounded in anti-queerness. The exhibition’s title refers to other types of skills soldiers might be required to demonstrate outside mastery of arms. In Abdouni’s hands, time-worn family images become soft evidence, pointing to the ways in which a child’s queerness resisted masculine norms and strained interfamilial relationships. A father gazes, disapprovingly perhaps, towards a little boy posing cross-legged in a green plastic chair (How to Properly Sit on a Chair, 1996). “Straighten your screws,” Abdouni was told as a child. Act like a man. Yet, the deliberate selection of images here—mostly of men, mainly Abdouni’s father—disrupt stereotypes of Middle Eastern men …

Stamina This is by no means comprehensive, so I’ll get my highlights out of the way. Rounding down, and starting with the experiential: I found the hunt for the various venues of Avant-Première compelling. This casually organized event was comprised of small Parisian galleries and emerging ventures opening their shows a few days before the fairs and driving traffic from post-Frieze London. Out-of-towners (this year, Los Angeles galleries) were embedded in unconventional spaces: up spiraling staircases and behind doorbell-laden portals. At the Beaux Arts, Nairy Baghramian’s exhibition of self-reflexive, materially seductive sculptures—in which shims and buffers, made of aluminum and cork, held up large unwieldy shapes—defied definitions of form; at Balice Hertling’s Marais space, Isabelle Cornaro’s detail-oriented objects and careful placement evoked stilled narratives; small captivating pictures by Lisetta Carmi hung quietly in Galerie Antoine Levi, capturing tender backstage scenes between sex-workers, trans lovers, and friends. A night, at the legendary club Les Bains Douches, where the smell of chlorine and the reflection of the indoor pool added to the intemperance of its crowd; a day prior, at a small hotel lounge, when our bartender told us that Oscar Wilde died just over there, a few feet away from our …