20.11.23 – 23.11.23, Botanical Intimacies

Postdoctoral Researcher at KASK & Conservatorium Benny Nemer presents his research at My Evidence: Creating LGBTQ+ Art and Archives, a conference at the Amsterdam Public Library October 3-4, 2024. The conference is organised by Perverse Collections, a pan-European research project led by researchers at Maastricht University (NL), Universidad de Murcia (ES) and University of St Andrews (UK). Nemer's presentation focuses on aesthetic strategies and ethical concerns when creating public-facing artworks that involve queer cultural material from domestic spaces rather than institutional archives. He discussed recent artistic activations of the libraries, homes, and gardens of queer cultural and intellectual figures in Amsterdam, London, and Montreal, as well as participatory, kinship-facilitating artistic gestures related to the dispersed postcard collection of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991). A core concern to this research is determining what archival material is shared with the greater public, what is for queer audiences only, and what remains entirely protected from view?

Essential Reading is a project that aims to enlarge, diversify and enrich Kunstenbibliotheek’s book collection. Which books are, today, really indispensible for an art library? Guests of Essential Reading bring together and present in the library the books they consider most valuable in their life and work.

Benny Nemer

Benny Nemer is an artist, diarist, and researcher based in Paris. Born in Montreal in 1973, he is the grandson of Quebec potter Rosalie Namer (1925–2006), whose artistic kinship instilled in him an early aesthetic sensibility that included an appreciation of objects, a practice of epistolary writing and a sympathy with flowers. His artworks often trace the affective contours of love and longing while facilitating bonds of kinship between his audience, figures from history and himself.

Nemer completed a practice-led PhD at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, where he was part of Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, a pan-European research project led by art historians, cultural anthropologists, and artists. 

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, where he is pursuing research into queer kinship in the spectre of AIDS, postcards as an artistic medium and the archive of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert. Nemer has exhibited internationally, and his work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Ystads Konstmuseum (Ystad) and Thielska Galleriet (Stockholm).

Join artist and KASK & Conservatorium postdoctoral researcher Benny Nemer for the launch of I Don’t Know Where Paradise Is, his first solo catalogue. Designed by Paris-based Clément Wibaut, the publication expands upon Nemer’s 2020 exhibition and eponymous audio work distilled from his research in the libraries of gay scholars in Amsterdam, London, Montreal, Paris and Vienna.

This beautiful and intimate book features lush photographs of the twenty-six floral arrangements created in response to the audio work, and essays by Heather Anderson, Ann Cvetkovich, Jennifer Evans, and John Potvin that situate Nemer’s work in broader, overlapping contexts.

At 18:30, friend, artistic researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, and graphic designer Paul Bailey will discuss the book project with Nemer. The publication will be available for purchase for € 20. An exhibition of flowers, photographs, and the accompanying audio work will remain on view in the Kunstenbibliotheek Cellarium until the flowers have faded.

Benny Nemer is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Recollecting Favourable Bodies was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund and is part of
the Archival Sensations Research Cluster.