Masculinities: Liberation through Photography explores the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed in photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the Barbican brings together the work of over 50 international artists, photographers and filmmakers including Laurie Anderson, Sunil Gupta, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien and Catherine Opie. Daniel Regan is a photographic artist whose work focuses on complex emotional experiences, often using his own lived experience of mental health difficulties as the stimulus. He’s interested in how we use photography as a way to process life’s experiences and can find a deeper understanding of who we are through photographs.

The exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. The show also highlights lesser-known and younger artists - some of whom have never exhibited in the UK - including Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas, Karlheinz Weinberger and Marianne Wex amongst many others. Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is part of the Barbican’s 2020 season, Inside Out, which explores the relationship between our inner lives and creativity.Fetishisation To turn the subject into a fetish, sexually or otherwise. Fetishisation in terms of gender and desire frequently occurs in conjunction with objectification and power. Men and women of colour are frequently fetishised by white people, in society and in artistic practice, through different stereotypes and limitations. Trans and disabled people are also subject to fetishisation, particularly in bodily terms. Kobena Mercer’s critical essay on Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Reading Radical Fetishism’, 1 and David Henry Hwang’s play and afterword to M. Butterfly (1988) both explore the notion of fetishisation. This autumn, the Gropius Bau presents Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, a comprehensive group exhibition that explores the diverse ways in which masculinity is experienced, performed and socially constructed through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day. Participating artists Bas Jan Ader, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Liz Johnson Artur, Knut Åsdam, Richard Avedon, Aneta Bartos, Richard Billingham, Cassils, Sam Contis, John Coplans, Jeremy Deller, Rineke Dijkstra, George Dureau, Thomas Dworzak, Hans Eijkelboom, Fouad Elkoury, Hal Fischer, Samuel Fosso, Anna Fox, Masahisa Fukase, Sunil Gupta, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani- Kayode, Karen Knorr, Deana Lawson, Hilary Lloyd, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Marlow, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Duane Michals, Tracey Moffatt, Andrew Moisey, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Catherine Opie, Elle Pérez, Herb Ritts, Kalen Na’il Roach, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Collier Schorr, Clare Strand, Mikhael Subotzky, Larry Sultan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hank Willis Thomas, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Weinberger, Marianne Wex, David Wojnarowicz and more. This plurality runs throughout the rest of the exhibition, which covers various aspects of masculinity. In the chapter titled ‘Too Close To Home: Family & Fatherhood’, we are presented with an early work by Hans Eijkelboom, With My Family (1973), in which he called on homes when the breadwinner was at work, and inserted himself into surrogate ‘family snaps’. In the same chapter, there is work from Masahisa Fukase, including moving images of physical decline in his lesser-known series, Memories of Father (published in 1991), and Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home (1992). MANDEM is an online media platform that offers a unique space for young men of colour to express themselves through writing, music and film. They provide a space for young people to engage in topical discussions centred around culture, politics and identity, while further encouraging them to challenge the narratives that appear in mainstream media.

Your object can be as serious or playful as you want it to be - perhaps you want to poke fun at the very concept of masculinity? At a time when ideas around masculinity are undergoing a global crisis and concepts such as “toxic” and “fragile” masculinity are shaping social discourse, over 300 works by 50 international artists including Laurie Anderson, Richard Avedon, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Wolfgang Tillmans offer a panorama of filmic and photographic explorations of masculinity rife with contradictions and complexity. The show also highlights lesser-known and younger artists such as Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas and Karlheinz Weinberger, among many others. Touching on themes of patriarchy, power, queer identity, race, class, sexuality and hyper-masculine stereotypes, as well as female perceptions of men, the works present masculinity as an unfixed, performative identity.Rebekka Yallop is an artist and writer based in London who works with moving image and text, often exploring queer themes. They were part of the Barbican’s Young Visual Arts group in 2019 and is currently one of Chisenhale Studios’ 2020 Into the Wild artists. They continue to make work, most recently a collaborative queer fiction zine. Gender roles Specific cultural roles defined by the weight of gendered ideas, restrictions and traditions. Men and women are often expected, sometimes forced, to occupy oppositional gender roles: aggressor versus victim, protector versus nurturer and so on. Many gender roles are specific to intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion and disabled status – examples of these types of gender roles can be seen in the stereotypes of the Jezebel or the Dragon Lady. Critical race theory A branch of scholarship emerging from the application of critical theory to the study of law in the 1980s, critical race theory (CRT) is now taken as an approach and theoretical foundation across both academic and popular discourse. CRT names, examines and challenges the social constructions and functions of race and racism. Rejecting the idea of race as a ‘natural’ category, CRT looks instead to the cultural, structural and legal creation and maintenance of difference and oppression. Scholars working in this field include Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Patricia Williams. Annie Hayter is a Barbican Young Poet. She won BBC Proms Young Poet in 2011, and was runner-up for Times Young Poet 2012. She’s performed at the Southbank Centre, Barbican, and on Radio 3. She is published in MAGMA and TimeOut.

Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructedfrom the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the exhibition brings together the work of over 50 international artists, photographers and filmmakers includingLaurie Anderson,Sunil Gupta,Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac JulienandCatherine Opie. In the wake of #MeToo, the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, racial politics, female perceptions of men, hypermasculinestereotypes, tendernessand the family, the exhibition examines the critical role photography and film have played in the way masculinitiesareimagined and understood in contemporary culture. In this exercise we'll be photographing an object of meaning that represents an element of ‘masculinity’ in your life. You can make your photograph any way that you like - on a smart phone, digital or film camera, depending on what you feel most comfortable with. Step 1: Find your object Exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is curated and organised by Barbican Centre, London. The exhibition will then tour to Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles from 29 June – 20 September 2020 and Gropius-Bau, Berlin from 16 October 2020 until 10 January 2021. The exhibition is designed by vPPR Architects with graphic design by The Bon Ton. dominant position. The term was coined in the 1980s by the scholar R. W. Connell, drawing on the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony.

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Kobena Mercer, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 307–29.

The U.K. capital’s infamous private boys’ clubs—which have produced many of the U.K.’s politicians—are depicted in 26 photographs by Karen Knorr. She shot the images in central London in the early 1980s at members-only, men-only spaces, and captioned them with snippets of overheard conversations, news reports, and government records. With their leather chesterfields and dark wood paneling—design elements that are common in other exclusive, male-dominated environments across Britain like private schools, Oxford University, and the Houses of Parliament—Knorr establishes an intriguing link between these hypermasculine environments, their architecture, and power. Normativity The process by which some groups of people, forms of expression and types of behaviour are classified according to a perceived standard of what is ‘normal’, ‘natural’, desirable and permissible in society. Inevitably, this process designates people, expressions and behaviours that do not fit these norms as abnormal, unnatural, undesirable and impermissible. Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: ‘ Masculinities: Liberation through Photography continues our commitment to presenting leading twentieth century figures in the field of photography while also supporting younger contemporary artists working in the medium today. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the resurgence of feminist and men’s rights activism, traditional notions of masculinity has become a subject of fierce debate. This exhibition could not be more relevant and will certainly spark conversations surrounding our understanding of masculinity.’ In the wake of #MeToo the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition shows how central photography and film have been to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. Watch

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Stephanie Rosenthal, Director of the Gropius Bau, states: “Today, common perceptions of what it means to be or to become a man are increasingly questioned, especially for younger generations, who are confronted with these questions in a completely different way. The exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography offers a nuanced examination of masculinities in all their facets and shades. The works by over 50 international artists on view in the exhibition build a bridge from classical images of masculinity to gender-fluid identities, thus doing justice to a complex reality.” But there are revelations alongside these familiar classics. German artist Marianne Wex’s comical cuttings archive observes, among much else, the ubiquity of manspreading in 1977. Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase’s time-lapse portraits of himself with his ageing father are a magnificent memorial to paternal love. And Larry Sultan’s tender images of his dad trying to fix the vacuum cleaner, practising his golf swing, or standing uselessly by the empty pool in California, seem to reverse the roles, so that the son becomes anxious parent to the father.