MASTERCLASS: Queer and Transparent Gazing – A conversation about the queer lens with Zackary Drucker, Aviv Shalem and Cerise Howard
Masterclass: Queer and Transparent Gazing runs Friday 13 September, 10.45am – 1.00pm at The Capitol, 113 Swanston Street.
This Masterclass is FREE for RMIT students and staff.
Please register for the event here and share the Facebook event!
In this Masterclass Zackary Drucker will deliver a keynote lecture about how she approaches queer creative practice and how she has contributed to queer representation through the TV series Transparent, for which she was a contributing producer, her work on the Gender Spectrum Collection – a genderqueer stock photography collection she created forBroadly –and her own artworks. What does it mean to Zackary to be a queer, trans artist, and what are the limits, provocations, critiques and creative goals of her work?
Zackary will then be joined by Aviv Shalem (Asis D’Orange) and film critic Cerise Howard on a panel to discuss queer art practices, how you ‘queer’ the gaze and what ‘queering’ the body through performance means to each of them. How does their art politicise the gaze and make ‘queer’ more visible?
The Masterclass will also include selected screenings of Drucker’s selected short films and video works, and a spoken word and video performance by Asis D’Orange.
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for This Is Me, a docu-series exploring the real-life, everyday issues of trans and gender-nonconforming people as well as a producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent. She is also the photographer for Broadly’s Gender Spectrum Collection, a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models, which aims to help media portray a more honest representation of the queer community
Going by the stage-name Asis D’Orange, Aviv Shalem is a gender-blending fashionista drag performer from Tel Aviv. As a genderqueer Arab-Jew raised in a religious household, Asis found themselves at several intersections of society. In drag Asis found a place to delve into fashion and art from a distinctly political, anarchist and genderqueer perspective. Their star has been on the rise since 2017 when they took home the crown in the Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival’s first drag competition. Shalem is passionate about fashion, feminism and veganism, and their work transgresses the ‘acceptable’ to explore these themes through a queer, anarchic perspective. Check Aviv’s Insta.
Cerise Howard is a freelance writer and critic, co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, and co-founder of both the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and tilde: Melbourne Trans & Gender Diverse Film Festival, co-host of Plato’s Cave on 3RRR and studio leader at RMIT.
Masterclass: Queer and Transparent Gazing is co-presented by RMIT Capital Theatre with the Festival of Jewish Art and Music(FOJAM) andsupported by RMIT School of Art CAST and School of Media & Communication.