Queer Culture Year: Even When We Can't We Must

Nat Pyper is an alphabet artist. In their work and writing, they use language as a sieve and they push the body through it. They also maintain ongoing research on queer anarcho-punk zines of the late 80s and early 90s. Their practice extends from this unruly history and its embodied politics of refusal. Their visual work has shown at Chuquimarca Projects, Gene Siskel Film Center, and RUSCHWOMAN in Chicago, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and Printed Matter in New York City. Their written work has been published by Are.na, Draw Down Books, Drawstring Magazine, GenderFail, Inga Books, Martian Press, Queer.Archive.Work, and the Walker Art Center. They received their MFA from the Yale School of Art. They are currently a 2021-22 HATCH Artist Resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

natpyper.com

Olivia Douglass is a British-Nigerian writer, poet and artist, living in London. They are the winner of the Guardian and 4th Estate 4thWrite Prize 2022 with their story 'Ink'. They are the author of Slow Tongue, a verse/lyric-essay hybrid that responds to M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks. Their writing appears in publications including Bath Magg, Nothing Personal, Prototype 2, and they wrote the foreword for Away With Word vol.4. A Barbican Young Poets Alumna, Olivia has been commissioned by the National Poetry Library (London) and Galleria Duarte Sequeira (Portugal), alongside curating reading rooms for Passa Porta Festival (Brussels) and Nottingham Contemporary. They have held residencies with Talawa Theatre Company and Theatre Peckham, been shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet Prize 2020, and in 2021 was longlisted for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. Olivia was the curator of Strange Echoes, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) in 2022, a six-day Black experimental poetry convening. Olivia is currently an MSt Creative Writing Student at the University of Oxford and is working on their first novel.

virgil b/g taylor is a faggot, living in Germany. He makes fag tips, an online speculative zine. He is one half of sssssssssSsss, a study-friendship with Ashkan Sepahvand, a third of Indefinite Leave to Remain with Moad Musbahi and Vishal Kumaraswamy, and a fraction of What Would An HIV Doula Do?, a collective of artists, writers, caretakers, activists and more gathered in response to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. His work explores histories of care, crisis, exclusion, and toxicity.

Zutana Hadaddeen is an activist, dancer and influencer. Known for her work to promote trans rights, Hadaddeen is also active on social media, first known for her humoristic tiktok videos. She often contributes to the public debate, among other things in the form of panel debates. At the age of 20, she has managed to win and be nominated for several awards for her work, among them Skamløsprisen from the organisation Sex og Samfunn, local newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad's BYAS award, the Rainbow Gala's Queer Role Model and a nomination for national newspaper Dagens Næringsliv Ledestjerne (Leading Star) in 2022. Hadaddeen has also featured in several TV and video productions, among them Norwegian broadcaster NRK’s programme Helene checks out trans women and a Pride campaign for Amnesty. Her most recent project includes participating as a dancer in a Travis Scott music video scheduled for release next year.

Haddadeen was born in Jordan to a Jordanian father and a Palestinian and Armenian mother. She has since grown up in the Stavanger region as part of a religious group, where she was not accepted for being queer. Today she lives in Copenhagen.