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Dr Gabe Beckhurst is an Associate Lecturer in the History of Art at UCL who specialises in histories of performance art and photography and their social and critical contexts. They hold a particular interest in the visual politics of self-articulation and worldbuilding, twentieth-century queer and trans formalisms, aesthetics and critical infrastructures, decolonial ecologies in performance and conceptual explorations of temporality and history.
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 engages a ‘chronopolitics’ of trans visualities through an array of non-representational strategies used by trans and gender non-conforming artists (1964–present), with attention to how multi-temporal artistic methods rearticulate the past, present and future of trans subjectivities and visualities beyond the conditional terms of state, imperial and national media.
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 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. This research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Paul Mellon Centre. They have a background in fine art and art theory, receiving a BA 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 practices across scholarship and artistic/social infrastructures, and widening access in and to the humanities.
Alongside their research they continue to contribute to curatorial projects. As 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), an exhibition spanning 29 artistic perspectives. Through 2021–22 they were the commissioning editor for Allegories of the Visible, an online journal for writing on photography and visual culture, 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 Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland. They have organised research symposia and arts programming for the University of York; Country SALTS, Bennwil, Switzerland; the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice and 1:54 FORUM, London and New York City, amongst others.
Research
Gabe’s current research project, Timely Grammars: Trans Worlds between Art and the Imperial 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. In Spring 2025, they will take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre towards this project.
Specialisms
Critical histories and practices of photography, performance and live art; LGBTQIA+ artmaking and cultural politics; decolonial ecologies and ecocritical debates and methods; identity and subjectivity; politics of the archive.
Selected Publications
Peer-reviewed chapters and articles
‘Survivalist Humour: Improvising at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Humour in Times of Confrontations, 1901 to the Present, ed. Shun-liang Chao and Vivienne Westbrook (London & New York: Routledge, expected 2025).
‘David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (2018)’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2020): 95–99.
Catalogues, art criticism
‘Technicolour Disenchantments: Michelle Williams Gamaker’, LUX, July 2024. [online]
‘Holy Motors: On Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s Reverse Tilt’, in Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: A future in the light of darkness (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2024, exh. cat).
‘Michelle Williams Gamaker: Thieves (or Searching for Sabu and Anna May)’, Allegories of the Visible, September 2022. [online]
‘Dig Where You Stand’, in Dispatch, published as part of the 57th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (New York: Dancing Foxes Press, 2019, exh. cat).
‘Talking Trees of the Natural Order’, in Claudia Comte: I Have Grown Taller from Standing with Trees (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Contemporary, 2019, exh. cat).
Edited collections
Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image, ed. Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti, Gabriella (Gabe) Beckhurst Feijoo and Oluremi C. Onabanjo (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022).
Teaching
For 2024–25 Gabe is teaching the MA Module: Toil & Trouble: Feminism and Art Now! (HART0163) and the Thematic Seminar ‘Bodies in Flux’ (HART0144).
In addition to teaching at UCL, they have taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, the University of York and the Courtauld.
