Contact
konuk.julian@gmail.com
@video___jockey
About
Julian Konuk’s practice centres around finding new ways of archiving queerness that do not directly stem from the alleged Western colonialist historicity. This tends to manifest itself through experimental, chaotic writing pieces lamenting on queer pasts of glitter and cabaret, zines foraying into queer futurities seen through ridiculous fonts in lime green, and short films recording short-lived epochs of queer utopias: laying in bed at home, cooking a partner veggie burritos with too much cheese, dancing around lazily in a park during a pandemic, or discussing the best black boots (vegan leather or real?) It is his interest and stake in these queer domesticities that often lead to investigations of various forms of moving and sonic and visual collage: a pictorial virtual landscape in which he tries to grasp at queer intimacies and sexual desires.
Emerging from an experimental and trans poetic approach, Julian Konuk’s research draws on themes of queer bodily abjection in relation to movements of/toward/away from home and the many nuanced and non-linear temporalities that such notions evoke. What is the relationship between queerness and movement? How might a queer body become, ie. be/come, become embodied, em/bodies; in its own body, in the space it “occupies,” etc. How might queer bodies be/come oriented in (a) space(s) not subject to a majoritarian cultural ideal of temporal linearity and biological lineage? How does queer movement away/from/to/towards home challenge linear trajectories of how we consider and think of the very idea of movement and migration? How do modern architectures and heterosexist spatialities perpetuate a framework for the oppression of trans bodies? Julian Konuk argues that an autobiographical trans poetics can provide a methodology for inhabiting a queer entanglement of desire and kinship not necessarily predicated on unitarian identities and singular, heternormative modes of belonging.
They are also the editor of Sexy TransMasc Calendar, which they founded in 2022.
Selected Group Screenings
MicroActs 16, Corner New Cross - London - 2023
Unleashed Reverie: Fluidity in Motion, Fringe! Queer Film Fest, Rich Mix - London, 2023
Trans Day of Joy, Somerset House - London, 2023
Miss Ellaneous, The Yard Theatre - London, 2023
Tuff & Tender, Avalon Cafe - London, 2023
Dykes Out, L’Oeil Club - Paris - 2023
Rebel Dykes, Avalon Cafe - London, 2023
Otherness Archive: Packed Desire, Barbican - London, 2022
Portals Cruising, Matchstick Piehouse - London, 2022
Live Art Club, VSSL Studio - London, 2022
The Voices Film Series, Bermondsey Project Space - London, 2022
Hearts and Crafts, Fringe! Queer Film Fest, Rose Lipman Building - London, 2022
Group Exhibitions
Uncensored Trans Queer Anti-Art Exhibition, Bureau of Silly Ideas - London - 2024
Open Wide III, 205 Deptford High Street - London - 2024
RCA Graduate Show, Truman Brewery - London - 2023
Off-RCA Photo, Les Rencontres d'Arles - Arles, France - 2023
Third Floor Gallery, Royal College of Arts - London - 2023
Tendrils, Queer Youth Art Collective, Queercircle - London, 2022
UAL Open Studios: Final Degree Show, Camberwell College of Arts - London - 2021
Don’t Panic, Southwark Park Galleries - London, 2021
WorkShops/Readings
Sissy Anarchy Fundraiser for “Trap Unfolds Me Greedily,” SET Social Peckham - London - 2024
FDBNHLLLTTFMOURNING Issue Launch, The Glory - London - 2023
Transmissions x Otherness Workshop and Screening, VFD - London - 2021
Awards
New Photography Prize - judged by Hana Noorali with the support of Simon Bishop - 2023
Group Publications
Queer Responses to Dante’s Inferno, Carrion Press - 2023
Mourning, Sticky Fingers Publishing - 2023
With No Orbit, Royal College of Arts - 2023
Education
MA Photography, Royal College of Arts - 2023
BA (Hons) Photography - Camberwell College of Arts - 2021