Photographer Fiona Clark's controversial Go Girl transgender exhibition has found a home at the Whangarei Art Museum, where it will run till early August. Clark's work is a captivating first-hand history of New Zealand's transvestite and transgender community. Critically acclaimed during its Sydney exhibition in 2003, it struggled to find a home in New Zealand, rejected by several galleries including national museum Te Papa. Two years later, the Whangarei Art Museum has taken it on board, along with Morrie Morrison's homoerotic Allure collection, as part of a commitment to providing space for LGBT culture to be showcased. "The Go Girl and Allure exhibitions reveal how living within these minority groups is at times exciting, terrifying, beautiful and sad," says museum director Scott Pothan, who describes the exhibition as both controversial and poignant. "The art museum adds two other Whangarei stories, one uplifting, the other tragic, to the context of the exhibition," adds Pohan. "Many stories are about takataapui marginalisation in Maori society too." The twin exhibits were opened earlier this month by MP Georgina Beyer. "One of the measures of a civilised society is when its minorities are included in the mainstream of arts, culture and heritage," she said at the launch.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Wednesday, 29th June 2005 - 12:00pm