Queering Connections: Glitchy Kinship
January 31^st–March 15^th 2025

Public Opening
Thursday, January 30^th, 17:00–19:00

This is the fifth iteration of the collaborative exhibition project ‘Queering Connections’. Based on an ongoing collaboration between sociologist Lizzie
Reed and visual artist Milou Stella, the exhibition brings Stella’s recent work into conversation with selected artists’ books from the University of Southampton Library’s internationally renowned Artists’ Book Collection located at Winchester School of Art.

Connection can describe an inheritance: of stories, objects, or genetics. It can describe a link in a chain: something repeated, copied, and intertwined with what has come before. A connection can also be something we feel: kinship, belonging, the affective links we have to other people or animals, to objects, stories, or to
our pasts and futures. Queering can mean a moment of interruption, change, or deconstruction. It might describe a rupture, gap or glitch in an otherwise orderly chain of copies.

Glitchy Kinship asks what happens when connections are interrupted, changed, distorted, and reconstructed. How do glitches create possibilities for new kinships between words, images, feelings, people, objects and imaginations? How can connection stretch, anchoring us to one another across time and space? In summary: what happens when ‘connection’ is ‘queered’? These pieces invite you to consider what happens as we collect, connect, queer, forget, and reconstruct the personal and the socio-cultural: our environments, norms, language, and stories.

We invite you to find your own story through the pieces on display, which includes artists’ books and a multimedia installation. There is no correct route between these works, and there is no single story to tell about the connections between them. The pieces are laid out unevenly to reflect the different rates of flow in connection, producing moments of glitch in the gallery space. You can connect further with the artworks, and each other, by participating in the drawing and magnetic poetry activities.