Making mental vulnerabilities visible and negotiable among the LGBTQIA+ community

Artists: Annaleen Louwes, Diana Blok, Dodi Espinosa, Gabrielle Le Roux, Jorik Amit Galama

Mind the Gap is a group exhibition addressing the gap between the mental health of LGBTQ+ people compared to that of the general population. Despite steps being made towards recognising this community as equal in society, statistics paint a sobering picture of the reality of living as LGBTQ+. The Netherlands, long considered as one of the countries in Europe with the most positive outlooks towards homosexuality, has created the image of the happy queer, but just how true is it? When suicide among LGBTQ+ young people is 4.5 times more common than among heterosexual young people, and almost half of LGBTQ+ people have contemplated ending their lives, the happy queer functions as a distractor, glossing over the everyday realities of being ‘different’. One in seven LGBTQ+ people (14%) have avoided treatment for fear of discrimination. When already faced with discrimination, having a mental health vulnerability increases feelings of shame and stigma, marginalising this community further.

This exhibition looks critically at these feelings to reveal how mental health continues to be prevalent within the LGBTQ+ community, and crosses over generational, social, and geopolitical borders. Artworks by Annaleen Louwes, Diana Blok, Dodi Espinosa, Gabrielle Le Roux (in collaboration with Mustafa and Mamakil) and Jorik Amit Galama show how we cannot talk about the mental health of LGBTQ+ people without also investigating the impact colonialism, gender violence, law and policy making has had on their day-to-day lives. The audience is invited to participate in a series of intimate encounters with people often overlooked in this community: the first-hand narratives and stories of queer migrants and refugees of colour, gender nonconformists, and trans activists are explored through portraiture, audiovisual works, and site-specific installations, which challenge the one-dimensional representation of the happy queer.

Accompanying the exhibition is a side programme of events welcoming a variety of communities to join our discussion on mental health and being LGBTQ+. In line with the Beautiful Distress Foundation’s core values of making mental health visible and tangible through art, #IMindTheGap is our visual language, a tool to communicate this urgent message: LGBTQ+ people are still falling through the gaps when it comes to talking about mental health.

Join us and say #IMindTheGap

About the artists:

Annaleen Louwes (Nederland, 1959)

Annaleen Louwes makes photographs and moving image works that focus on the fragile and transient nature of human existence. Her interest lies in the way people survive in difficult circumstances and the impact this has on their bodies. Louwes has worked with undocumented migrants, psychiatric patients during her residency at Kings County Hospital, New York in 2014 with Beautiful Distress, sex workers in Colombia and built a studio in a women’s prison in Tirana.

Pronoun: she

Diana Blok (Uruguay, 1952)

Diana Blok is a self-taught visual artist born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She lived in Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia before choosing Amsterdam as a base from which she could function more freely as a female artist. Her nomadic background allows her to capture different cultures and identities in her photography and video installations, challenging the structures of the established order as an inspirator, innovator and connector. She investigates subjects as identity, gender, sexual diversity and culture with poetic and confrontational imagery. In the past 6 years her work evolved into interactive-video installation ’Gender Monologues’, unsettling the gender binary and performing archetypes of femininity and masculinity, blurring the disciplines of the moving image, performance and literature.

Pronoun: she

Dodi Espinosa (Mexico, 1985)

Dodi Espinosa is an interdisciplinary artist, who uses a wide variety of mediums to reflect on themes like his sexual identity as a gay Latino, and wider issues surrounding race, sexuality, mental health and identity. Inspired by archaeology, sacred art, pop and Indigenous cultures, Espinosaʼs distinctly visual works disguise deeper messages. His work can be seen as both; socially engaged and confessional, rooted in his personal life experiences, but also as a queer and postcolonial critique of universal
issues.

Pronoun: he

Gabrielle Le Roux (VK, 1961) – in collaboration with Mustafa and Mamakil

Gabrielle Le Roux is a queer South African artist, filmmaker, and activist for social justice. Le Roux collaborates, often at the invitation of other activists, to create portraits drawn from life onto which each person writes directly. Le Roux’s work stems from the conviction that people educate and transform one another through sharing the knowledge acquired through lived experience. First-person narratives in text, voice or video accompany the portrait drawings.

Pronouns: they + she

Jorik Amit Galama (Nederland, 1992)

Jorik Amit Galama is an interdisciplinary artist working between fine art, literature and cinema. Their work is concerned with the desire to make the vulnerability of the body experienceable, to connect with its flaws, sensuality, scars, and all the ways in which it is porous to the ecosystem(s) in which it is situated. The sharing of intimate stories is at the centre of their practice, thereby often focusing on how trauma, mental health and discrimination play out in everyday situations and encounters for LGBTQIA+ people.

Pronoun: they