videoclub presents a curated programme of artists’ film and video as part of A Queer Night at the Museum, bringing together UK and international artists whose work explores queerness, gender, the body and identity through personal, political and speculative lenses.
🎟️Tickets, location and date
Date and time: 6 February, 7:30-11pm
Venue: Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton BN1 1EE (click here for a map)
Tickets: SOLD OUT
A Queer Night at the Museum is a vibrant late-night event at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery celebrating LGBTQ+ history and creativity, timed with the launch of the Gender Stories and The Sussex Lancers: Tailor-made Leather Lovers exhibitions. For one evening only, Queer Heritage South takes over the museum with film & video, live performances, DJs, dancing, a wearable art fashion show, tours, interactive activities like badge-making and photobooths, and much more. It’s a chance to experience queer heritage and contemporary queer arts in an immersive, party-style cultural fest that brings together community, performance, and museum spaces.
A Queer Night at the Museum is curated and produced by Queer Heritage South, in partnership with Brighton & Hove Museums. It celebrates the launch of the Gender Stories exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.
📽️About the screening programme
Across documentary, experimental and narrative forms, the programme foregrounds stories of becoming, displacement, desire and resistance. The films reflect on how gender and sexuality are lived and negotiated in relation to family, cultural memory, migration, history and fantasy – often centring bodies and experiences that challenge dominant norms and fixed categories.
The programme includes intimate autobiographical reflections on transition and self-acceptance; re-imagined histories that reclaim suppressed or marginalised queer narratives; and poetic, sensuous explorations of desire, passion and belonging. Together, the works create a space for multiple queer perspectives to coexist, revealing gender as fluid, contested and continually re-made.
Presented within the vibrant, celebratory context of A Queer Night at the Museum, the screening invites audiences to encounter moving-image works that are reflective, provocative and deeply human – offering moments of connection, recognition and re-imagining.
📼Films in the programme
🎞️Effy Adar, Shea, by NASRA, 2021
A family displaced by greed searches for a new home in a foreign place. As they explore they discover pieces of themselves; old and new. “Shea” celebrates what has always remained in Black/African peoples, an innate sense of home, luxury and interconnectedness.
🎞️Harun Güler, IN LIMBO, 2022
Directed by Harun Güler, IN LIMBO is a poetic short film that challenges Middle Eastern conventions through intimate vignettes of taboo-breaking personalities in Istanbul. Treading the line between documentary and highly stylised fiction, the work subverts traditional gender expectations. Striking scenes include a masculine-presenting group on a shoreline discussing girls before one reveals top surgery scars, and a belly dancer in the desert lifting a veil to reveal a moustache. Produced for NOWNESS, the film serves as a subversive ode to identity, free from cultural clichés.
🎞️Jun Jieh Wang, Passion, 2017
The fall of passion in the daily life of a lunatic. The story begins with the uncanny arrival of Hal, an astronaut, at an abandoned pier at sunset. Three sailors have wandered to the pier, filling the deserted pier with a flow of desire. Passion refers to both physical, sensual passion and artistic passion. When passion stops, all driving forces subsequently fade. What is strong enough to halt passion then?
🎞️Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner, A Tight, Warm Hug, 2024
I’m safe, I’m loved and I’m Lucy.
Lucy Rose, a transgender woman, shares her journey of self-love and empowerment since starting hormone replacement therapy three years ago. The film is part animation, part documentary and part VHS archive footage.
🎞️Su Hui Yu, The Glamorous Boys of Tang, 2018
In 1985, two years before the end of Taiwan’s martial law period, the renowned poet and screenwriter Chui Kang-Chien’s (邱剛健) Tang Chao Chi Li Nan (trans: The Glamorous Boys of Tang) was first screened in Taiwan. Perhaps the filmmakers could not fully present the radicalism and passion of the screenplay due to budget restrictions, censorship, or marketing concerns. More than thirty years later, with new funding and film technology, Su Hui Yu has re-created The Glamorous Boys of Tang to call together the differently gendered bodies and subcultures of Taiwan’s diverse society. The film can be seen as re-narration of the original 1985 version, or the next leg of its journey.
