Over the last decades, a number of artists working within the field of queer and feminist politics have turned to historical archives in search for “friends from the past” – historical figures that appear to “queer” imaginaries in and of the past as well as the present. This paper seeks to discuss the politics of appearance of such forms of queer history through an analysis of a 2013 exhibition organized by the Norwegian queer feminist platform FRANK, where images from the Swedish contemporary artist Klara Lidén’s series Untitled (Handicap) (2007) encounter portraits of and by the Norwegian commercial photographer and suffragette Marie Høeg (1866-1949), taken sometime between 1896 and 1905. The meeting between these artists is far from straightforward, filled with dissonances as much as resonances, inviting questions such as, what are the conditions that make historical figures visibly “queer” in the realm of contemporary sexual politics today? Through an analysis of how the exhibition Marie Høeg Meets Klara Lidén puts pressure on the ways in which historical images and images of history not only represent but shape, produce, and take part in the production of the present as much as the past, this paper invites a discussion of what I tentatively call a queer politics of appearance.

Conference organized by Professor Dominic Janes, Keele University, UK.