Join Gemma Rolls-Bentley, Louise Siddons, Mal Parry and Bean Yazzie for a conversation exploring queer and trans art in the UK today.
Taking the exhibition as a starting point, they will discuss performance and movement, the development of New Ceremonies and the possibilities of looking at archives through a queer and decolonial lens.
Together, they’ll consider what we mean by ‘queer art’ and how artists challenge traditional boundaries between materials and histories through contemporary queer practices. The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and an opportunity to continue the discussion informally.
Mal Parry will be activating the artwork with a performance at 5pm.
Agenda:
5-5:30pm – Performance with Mal Parry
5:30-6pm – Break
6-7:15pm – Panel discussion
7:15-8pm – Questions and networking
About the speakers:
Gemma Rolls-Bentley has been at the forefront of contemporary art for two decades, working passionately to champion diversity in the field. Her latest publication Art Essentials: Queer Art, coauthored with Mollie Barnes, was published by Thames & Hudson in April 2026. Her debut book Queer Art; From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between is a Lambda Literary Award finalist and has been highlighted as a must-read by Them, Dazed, Timeout, The Guardian, Cultured and the FT. Her curatorial practice amplifies the work of female, queer and trans artists and provides a platform for art that explores LGBTQIA+ identity.
Mal Parry has been commissioned by John Hansard Gallery to create a new body of work for the exhibition. Parry (British, b. 1981), is a trans*disciplinary artist whose practice spans and splices scenography, drag, visual art and performance. Their work centres queer histories, narratives and bodies, arguing for queer and trans identity as communal craft project. Drawing on their experience in archival installation, costume design, and socially engaged practice, Parry’s new work refigures archival knowledge about Joan of Arc and Eleanor Rykener through performative and ritualised practices of making that reveal identity as process.
Louise Siddons’ newest body of work makes visible the intangible, embodied archive contained within queer dancers past and present. The work in New Ceremonies foregrounds collaboration and process, creating space for shared forms of meaning-making while refusing the impulse to render queer bodies as spectacle. Centred on dance and movement, Siddons’ contribution draws on her extensive background in historic Anglo-American social dance traditions, using choreographic structures and embodied participation to activate the pervasive queerness of this archive and invite audiences into its living, moving histories.
Bean Yazzie’s contribution builds on The Dilbaa Project, an ongoing series of photographic and audio portraits of queer Diné (Navajo) women, transmasculine, and nonbinary people and their families. Initiated in collaboration with Siddons in 2019, the project grounded Yazzie’s return to the Navajo Nation in an exploration of Indigenous, queer, and transmasculine k’e (kinship). Through intimate conversations, collaborative portrait-making, and their own powwow dancing, Yazzie constructs a living archive that resists colonial frameworks and binary gender systems, foregrounding the complexity and specificity of Diné experiences.