Two bodies of work pushing for the right to exist in our own skin on our own terms: Ren Hang UK premiere & Robin Hammond’s Where Love is Illegal.

How do you present yourself on your own terms, when your society wants to see you presented on theirs?

Here, we offer two bodies of work that are pushing for the right to exist in our own skin on our terms: Robin Hammond’s urgent Where Love is Illegal and a UK premiere of the work of Ren Hang.

Both photographers make work concerned with sexual and gender identities, and address global issues of representation through close, intimate portraits.

Portraits made with people, sensitively, are invitations to make a connection, to be identified with. When these portraits are of people with identities that some people do not tolerate — whether through discrimination laws, prejudice or censorship —  this connection becomes powerful. It becomes a way to seek and galvanise support for overcoming discrimination, taboo and alienation — worldwide.

Both collections of work are intensely personal, but through them we encounter the universal politics of our identities, bodies, and sexual autonomy. Through photography, they work towards a world where all genders and all sexual identities are accepted, where we can identify how we wish without it interfering with our everyday lives, and where our bodies are absolutely ours.

Please note: this exhibition contains accounts of violence and prejudice. It also contains nudity.

Wake Up Together is part of Homotopia 2018. Where Love is Illegal is a Witness Change project. Exhibition of Ren Hang’s work organised in cooperation with Stieglitz19, Belgium.

VR experience made by CaptureVR.