Queereal Secretions is the second exhibition to be held at Annex Gallery, and has been devised and curated by the School of Fine Art’s Queer Materialities research group. The exhibition builds on the symposium, What’s the Matter? Queer Materiality and Communities of Making, that took place in June 2022 at Glasgow School of Art and which prompted the group’s inauguration.
Over the last eighteen months, the group has been meeting to discuss ideas around shapeshifting, the queerness of queer research and queerness in the widest sense of the word, especially as it may be applicable to artistic research. Whilst considering the viability of queerness the project also attends to the conceptualisation of the ‘exquisite’ as providing a framework for artist research practices. In turn, this led to ideas of excess and spillage, of things that are difficult to describe, the indescribable matter of making and the limitations of the lexical, the live time of performance and the temporality of sound, the fragmentary, the fleeting, the sweating of the queer and the real into existence and the endless potential of secretion. Hence the title of the show and its accompanying publication, Queereal Secretions: Artistic Research as Exquisite Practice, the latter of which will be launched at a special event on 30 November 2023.
The exhibition provides a platform for the exposition of the work of artists and artistic researchers and includes work collected upon visits to museums and galleries e.g., the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Yoko Ono. It has been developed in parallel to the publication, both of which attend to various ‘exquisite’ possibilities including collaborations, collisions, dissemination, environments, mattering and methods. So, from What’s the Matter? with its inherent double movement and shapeshifting refrain, to Queereal Secretions’ creative sweating of bodies and matter into form, we are presented here with ‘exquisite fabulations’ that are sometimes straightforward, sometimes oblique, sometimes abrasive, sometimes confusing yet nonetheless compelling, for does not confusion always lead to another critical thought? We sincerely hope so. Let the proceedings begin.

Nicky Coutts and Henry Rogers