HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Transported by a narrative that opens up possibilities and crosses boundaries
Trans is an evocative title for an art exhibition. As Brazilian curator and researcher Daniella Géo observes, "trans" has morphed from a mere prefix to "a word in its own right". This shift opens up new conceptual possibilities: "trans" as an adjective or a noun pertaining to a person challenges fixed categories of gender and sexual biology, but this has wider implications. You might say, applying a broad interpretation, that we are all "trans" — in an ongoing process of changing, becoming something new, being in one place and then another. "Trans" means travelling across, going through, moving beyond; it is exciting, daunting, stimulating, unfamiliar. It is also the perfect descriptor for the Bag Factory, an arts programme founded in 1991 that has drawn dozens of artists from around the country and the globe to its Fordsburg studios, and that has itself shape-shifted and been reinvented over 27 years. It transforms as new artists join its expanding collective — and those artists, i...
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