Divine icons roam as lens
by Marina Grize
Sweetwater Gallery
March 5, 2026 through to April 18, 2026
Leipziger Straße 56-58, Berlin, Germany
The photographs as they appear in On Our Backs were never intended for all audiences. Obfuscation in the work is both a conceptual choice and a preservation of the original conditions of the magazine's circulation, its intimacy, its assumption of a particular reader. The two primary sources, On Our Backs and Valencia Street, are linked through place, time, and a shared project of lesbian sexual and cultural visibility, but, as mentioned earlier, neither is publicly apparent today. The title of the show Divine icons roam as lens is a near-anagram of Valencia in Mission Dolores. An anagram felt structurally true to the history I was working with. Terry Castle's concept of the "apparitional" lesbian describes a figure who has been made to not-quite-appear in Western cultural representation, present only as rumor, as shadow, as implication. The history is there but it requires a particular kind of attention to see.
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