Tessa Boffin’s artistic practice spanned photography, writing, performance and activism, consistently challenging dominant narratives around gender, sexuality and visibility. Boffin’s work remains urgently relevant to contemporary queer and feminist communities and this project asks what it means for an archive to be a generative, collective space.

The exhibition features work by Tessa Boffin archives and newly commissioned work from artists Sophie Mak-Schram and Leah McLaine, developed in direct response to Boffin’s images, pedagogy and politics. Both artists and the curatorial team have been immersed in extensive archival research, drawing on collections held by the University for the Creative Arts, The Estate of Tessa Boffin/The Gupta+Singh Archives and Hales Gallery (London and New York).

 

This project is grounded in a collective, intersectional approach to curatorial research, led by four emerging curators whose practices are rooted in queer and feminist frameworks: Polly Wright (Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne), Jazz Swali (BACKLIT, Nottingham), Ricardo Reverón Blanco (previously Aspex Portsmouth), and Danit Ariel (Photoworks).

 

Where We Touch the Archive Symposium

Welcome and a note on THE DRAFT – Polly Wright and Jazz Swali

Living with Archives
Flora Dunster
A reflection on ten years of working in the Tessa Boffin archive, and the affective arc of durational research.

Angel without a Face
Åsa Johannesson
This paper considers Tessa Boffin’s photographic practice through lesbian allegory and the studio portrait.

TBD: the archive and uncertainty 
Dana Brass

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Catch me should I fall: Held in a portrait
Leah Mclaine and Danit Ariel
A discussion between curator Danit Ariel and photographer Leah Mclaine on themes of care, bravery, desire and play in the practice of making portraits and across Tessa Boffin’s archive.

Not an object to my subject
Sophie Mak-Schram & Erin Holly
A performative reading, exploring relational desire, care and consent through the text element of Sophie’s newly commissioned “asking for everything” (2026), which responds to Tessa Boffin’s archive and work.

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Where We Meet: Between Photography and Land
Queer Grounds, Georjie from In Our Hands, Eva Jonas, Kairo Urovi, SHARP and Ricardo Reverón Blanco
A roundtable exploring how queer, collective practices can create spaces of encounter between land, photography, making and memory. We’ll consider how images can become prompts for collaboration, and how archives can remain living spaces for meeting, learning and making.

Shreds without Showing
Sophie Seita
A lecture performance, or body talk in empty slides, will poetically and performatively engage with Tessa Boffin’s archive, and specifically her distinctly literary imagination and methods. Inspired by Boffin’s photo-theatre, Seita presents a theatre without images, or rather a translation of slides, of the archive, into text, gesture, and garment, the slide as stage.

Closing the space
Stav B

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Also showing at Phoenix Art Space:

Dates: 2- 31 October

Exhibition: Photo Fringe Collectives Hub

The Photo Fringe presents 8 photography collectives in the Collective’s Hub at Phoenix Art Space, curated under Phoenix’s theme of Future Histories. This theme encourages audiences to explore how the past continues to inform, configure, and sometimes overshadow the present. It also asks us to understand that we are not bystanders in the flow of history and compels us to consider how our actions today will shape tomorrow’s history.