New work from Jez Dolan for Push Festival

The annual PUSH Festival, will be between 12 - 27 January 2018, and is firmly established as one of the region’s major showcases featuring talent from the north west across the fields of film, theatre, and visual arts.

This year, alongside a two-week programme, Home presents a weekend of workshops, discussions, and events in conjunction with Random Acts North, aimed at creatives aiming to further their creativity, networks, and careers.Jez Dolan’s work focuses on queer identity, often using secrecy, hiddenness and codification of language, working with archival material in the creation of new work. He works with a variety of disciplines according to the needs and demands of each project. During an artist residency in early 2017 at the Schwules Museum, Berlin, Jez first watched the film Anders Als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919).

Despite being made almost a century ago, the film asks for tolerance and understanding for gay men. It is simultaneously a museum piece and a prescient call for acceptance, which might provide useful instruction to many people, including governments who espouse harmful discrimination and officially sanctioned hatred to deadly means.

Watching the film opened up resonances with ideas already under exploration, specifically the eradication and erosion of the rights of queer people in many countries, not least Trump’s USA. Jez had also been thinking about reparative therapy, ‘homosexual cures’ and the torture, imprisonment and murder of queer people currently happening in Chechnya.

Fri 12 Jan 2018 – Sun 4 Mar 2018

Published: 4-Jan-2018: (4686)