Category: Exhibition

• The Club’s Conception (Or, How the Egg Was Cracked) II

  Birmingham Hippodrome
  15 Sep – 14 Nov 2020

  “From my understanding, the Hippodrome wanted that place so bad for a long time because it was ideal for them, you know? And we basically said ‘no, you’re not having it’. I wasn’t privy to how much they charged because we were members committee not general committee, but they wanted it for years but we said ‘no, no, no, no’.” – Angela Gilraine, The Nightingale Club’s first female Director

  If Memory Serves narrates the previous venue of Birmingham’s oldest queer space, The Nightingale Club. The exhibition forms part of an ongoing research project by Ryan Kearney, which born out of gaps in the city’s queer record, considers the closure of LGBTQ+ spaces, their exclusionary practices and the role of memory in forming a queerer archive.

  The Nightingale Club’s history centres on narratives of migration and erasure. From a terraced house to an ex-working men’s club, its previous sites faced compulsory purchase orders and rejected applications for expansion. Modelled after a gay village, the club’s third iteration on Thorp Street was purchased by Birmingham Hippodrome in 1994 following ongoing efforts, and was subsequently demolished for their expansion. Merging recollections, personal ephemera and archival material, If Memory Serves re-positions collective narratives upon the site of club’s former foundations.

  To its members, the club was an extension of home, but women could not obtain membership until the mid-1990s. According to Anne Ellen, entry “depended on the guards at the door, but it also depended on the members. There were guys that liked women coming in, but there were also guys that didn’t like women coming in because they felt like it was their space – it was quite difficult to integrate.”

  The exhibition’s title is taken from If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past, Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed’s argument for queer memory as an activist tool. The display advocates the role of memory in remedying fractured queer narratives, while forming an understanding between cross-generational experiences and the ongoing displacement of our queer ecosystems.

  The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of workshops, through which participants are invited to record Birmingham’s queer spaces, both past and present. This research will form a publication delivered in collaboration with SHOUT Festival of Queer Arts and Culture in November 2019.

  Photos by John Fallon

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• The Club’s Conception (Or, How the Egg Was Cracked)

  Recent Activity
  4 May – 1 Jun 2019

  The Club’s Conception (or How the Egg Was Cracked) is an exhibition which looks to retrace the past venues of Birmingham’s longest-running queer space, The Nightingale Club. In collaboration with those who attended its three preceding venues, Intervention Architecture and Ryan Kearney map these spaces from recollections, replacing absent photographs while positioning personal and collective narratives within archival significance.

  Founded as a member’s association in 1969, The Nightingale Club leased a two-up, two-down house on Camp Hill. Much like a home, visitors requested entry and could be denied, reflecting the necessitated subtlety of early queer establishments. Following a compulsory purchase order in 1975, the venue moved to a working men’s club on Witton Lane, before taking up residence in a fishing association on Thorp Street in 1981, where it remained until it was sold in 1994. The club’s previous sites reflect ongoing threats of regeneration in Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ community, and the need to shift, occupy and adapt heteronormative structures while providing important spaces for queer people.

  The Club’s Conception (or How the Egg Was Cracked) consists of armatures which carry the participant’s sketches and their culmination as architectural renderings, models illustrating the club’s structures based only on recollections and text which blends descriptions of walls, floors, doors and windows.

  Using architecture as a point of departure, the exhibition confronts the problematics of a queer venue. Initially run for and by gay men, it was only in the mid-1990s that women could become members of The Nightingale Club, something which is reflected by the ratio between men and women in the project’s list of participants. Prior to becoming a member, women would need to be signed in by and have their drinks purchased for them by a male member. While eventually permitted entry, participants describe entire rooms being annexed by female attendees, creating a safer space within a so-called safe space.

  Exhibition Guide

  Art Monthly, July 2019
  Art Monthly Podcast, July 2019
  New Art West Midlands, May 2019

  Photos by John Fallon