Dr Gabe Beckhurst

Dr Gabe Beckhurst is an Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art who specialises in histories of performance, photography and time-based media. They have a particular interest in queer, feminist and trans theory, cultural politics and aesthetics in a transnational context, ecological and decolonial approaches in art history, and gender, sexuality and race more broadly.

Gabe has taught courses on performance art, artists and transnational archives, and the politics of the body and vision at the Slade, University of York and UCL. Their teaching and research draws from a range of influences including queer and trans studies, performance studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, Indigenous studies and Black feminist visual theory.

Gabe’s current research project, Timely Grammars: Trans Worlds between Art and the Archive in Britain tracks a ‘chronopolitics’ of found and reproductive media, spanning collage, assemblage and print in the work of trans and gender non-conforming artists primarily in the UK from the 1970s to the present. The project centres non-linear and multi-temporal methods of trans visual and material historiography, asking how trans being, feeling and relation may be productively considered through the frame of untimeliness, and how methodologies emergent through these artists’ work bear on the normative conditioning of historical time.

Background

Gabe received their PhD in art history from UCL in 2022. Their doctoral research explored the intersection of feminist, queer and ecological cultural politics and artistic strategies from the acceleration of the contemporary environmental movement in the 1970s through to the early 2000s, showing how these artists innovated conceptual practices through the contingencies of their social identities and ecological awareness. Their research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Terra Foundation for American Art, and they will take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre in Spring 2025.

They hold a BA in fine art from Norwich University of the Arts and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. As a result of this trajectory, Gabe is chiefly interested in art history as an interdisciplinary arena of study, cross-reading historical forms across scholarly and artistic research and practice, and widening access to these fields.

Alongside their research they continue to contribute to curatorial projects. As a curator of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022, they co-curated Currency: Photography Beyond Capture at Deichtorhallen Hamburg–Halle für aktuelle Kunst (with Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti and Oluremi C. Onabanjo). Through 2021–22 they were commissioning editor for Allegories of the Visible and co-editor of Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image (Hatje Cantz, 2022). Previous curatorial projects include Dig Where You Stand for the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and ZEITSPUREN: The Power of Now, Kunsthaus Biel, Switzerland. They have devised research symposia and public programming for the University of York, Country SALTS, Bennwil, Switzerland, the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale and 1:54 FORUM, London and New York.