Throughout July and August, Sonia Ekiyor-Katimi, an architectural designer and visual artist whose mural work currently graces a building in downtown Sudbury, will be the artist in residence at La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (GNO) and showing their works in a series called Tenderly Coded.
Non-binary and originally from Nigeria, Ekiyor-Katimi has also participated in the Up Here festival, Nuit Blanche (Sudbury and Montréal), Black Lives Matter Sudbury panels and group installations for upcoming festivals.
Ekiyor-Katimi’s work explores what is is like growing up “secretly queer.” They said it affects a child in many ways, but the most damning is the burden of shame.
“Although our societies have taught us to be ashamed of sex and sexual desire, this judgment disproportionally affects queer people,” stated Ekiyor-Katimi in a release. “While some communities are privileged enough to begin shedding this shame, we among the queer community continue to see the reality of our loves, intimacies, and vulnerability reduced to mere deviant perversions.”
Ekiyor-Katimi also points to the effects of oversexuality in the media.
“Whether a queer person is actually sexual or not, we cannot avoid nor determine our depiction and frequent over-sexualization in the media, which leaves the realities of our love largely unexamined,” states Ekiyor-Katimi. “The intersections of race, disability, and gender cloud the topic behind yet more judgement, more silence, and more shame.”
But it is this silence and shame that can also birth new ways to communicate, new ways to find attraction and love; what Ekiyor-Katimi refers to as the “magnetic nature of queer attraction and its secret language of desire.”
“Cultivated through centuries of secrecy, aroused by furtive glances, a stolen caress, a heavy silence, it is this language that I wish to explore,” said Ekiyor-Katimi. “Through multimedia portraiture, interviews/film, and installation, my aim is to unveil the ways in which queer people of different backgrounds have experienced desire, secret communication, shame, vulnerability, and comfort.”
Ekiyor-Katimi said they “want to present a body of work that stands as a lexicon for love and longing, that transgresses respectability, objectification and sexualization, and elevates, above it all, the intimate beauty of queer love.”
You can view the work running through August and find more information by clicking here.
