Curating Visual Archives of Sex: A Roundtable Discussion

Ashkan Sepahvand (*1984, Tehran) is a writer and artistic researcher. His practice is text based and highly collaborative, taking form as publications, performances, situations, and study. He has presented his work at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA (13), Sharjah Biennials X & 13, Gwangju Biennale 11, Ashkal Alwan, Sursock Museum, and ICA London, among others. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in fine art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where he is a Clarendon-AHRC Scholar.

Meg Slater is assistant curator in the International Exhibition Projects Department at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Slater has an interest in the potential for large art museums to center traditionally overlooked subjects through exhibition making and programming, particularly queer histories and identities. Slater works on many of the NGV’s major international exhibitions and is part of the curatorial team developing the forthcoming Queer (2022). Slater recently completed a Master of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne.

Annette F. Timm is professor of history at the University of Calgary and editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Specializing in twentieth-century German and European history, she is the author of The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (2010) and coauthor of Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day (3rd edition forthcoming) and Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories (2020).

Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar-curator at the ONE Archives. She teaches trans and queer theory at the University of Southern California, and her publications have appeared in GLQ, TSQ, and Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017).

Heike Bauer is professor of modern literature and cultural history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on sexology, literature, and the modern history of sexuality, and on the rise of queer and feminist graphic novels. Her most recent book is The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (2017; available open access: www.oapen.org/search?identifier=628406). She is now at work on a cultural history of the dangerous dog.

Katie Sutton is an associate professor of German and gender studies at the Australian National University. She is the author of Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s–1930s (2019) and The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (2011), and articles on the history of gender, sexuality, and sexology in early twentieth-century Germany, including interwar trans subcultures.