This summer I am exhibiting a new body of work at HOME, created in response to the Queer Up North archive. The exhibition is called To See and Be Seen. It is about memory. About Manchester. About queer lives that refused to disappear. About what happens when fragments of photographs, flyers, stories and protests survive long enough to become history. Some of the works are joyful. Some are defiant. Some ask difficult questions. All of them begin with a simple thought: What does it mean to be seen?

There is a preview : 6pm – 8pm on 7^th  July at HOME at the Granada Foundation Galleries (the first and second floor of home). Exhibition runs July–October. I would be delighted to see some of your faces there: https://www.homemcr.org/whats-on/to-see-and-be-seen-by-conor-collins-dnkx

Queer Up North archive

There is a strange thing that happens when people survive long enough to become an archive. The rough edges get sanded down. The arguments fade. The fear becomes courage. The noise becomes history. A protest placard becomes a photograph. A nightclub becomes a footnote. A decade of memories can become a box on a shelf.

When I first began exploring the Queer Up North archive, I found myself thinking about the distance between a life lived and a life remembered. The archive contains evidence of people who fought to exist in public. People who built communities when there were very few places willing to hold them. People who created art, performance, activism, friendship and joy, often in circumstances that were far less welcoming than those many of us experience today. Looking through these materials, I realised that archives do not simply preserve history. They ask questions of the present:

• Who gets remembered?
• Who gets forgotten?
• Who was allowed to be seen?
• And who is still waiting?

To See and Be Seen is my response to those questions. The exhibition is not an attempt to illustrate the archive. It is a conversation with it. The works move across different materials, styles and approaches. Some pieces emerge directly from images and documents I encountered. Others explore ideas of visibility, identity, performance, community and memory. Some celebrate. Some mourn. Some refuse to settle into either category.

Queer history is often told as a story of progress. A neat line moving steadily forward. Real lives are rarely that tidy. They are complicated, contradictory, messy and brilliant. One of the things that struck me most while working on this exhibition was how familiar many of these stories still feel. The desire to belong. The fear of being judged. The search for community. The courage required to be visible. These are not historical concerns. They remain deeply contemporary ones. The exhibition’s title comes from that idea, to see and be seen. Not simply to look, but to recognise. Not to just appear, but to exist in the eyes of others. There is something profoundly human about wanting our lives to leave a trace. We all want evidence that we were here. That we mattered. That somebody noticed.

The people represented within the Queer Up North archive left those traces behind. This exhibition is my attempt to spend time with them. To listen. To respond. To say thank you. And perhaps, in doing so, to ask visitors a question of their own…what parts of ourselves do we allow the world to see? What might happen if we were brave enough to be seen fully?

Manchester has always been a city of storytellers, outsiders, dreamers and troublemakers. This exhibition belongs to that tradition. It is about queer history, certainly, but it is also about the quiet, radical act of making sure that those who came before us are not forgotten. Because every archive begins with someone refusing to disappear.

By: Conor Collins (He/Him/They/Them) – Data Curator, Henry Royce Institute 

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