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CELEBRATING 150 YEARS OF CREATIVE EXCELLENCE 1873 — 2023

Markus Denil

Three disks made of gelatin and glycerin. — Soft Weight, 2023

Markus Denil

Website: markusdenil.com/
Ins: @sillyboy.ca

Artist Statement

To be trans is to exist apart.

To be trans is to be human.

Using my personal experiences of marginalization, temporal displacement, and spatial dissociation as an entry point, I explore, examine, and ask questions about the world through which I move. I contend with the haunting forces of time and space, and struggle to understand and contextualize them. The thread of transness runs through my life and work, trailing back to my very beginnings.

Transmen live in and through a state of ambiguity: not quite, but not quite not either. There’s a presence in the absence. There’s a safety in becoming invisible, but that knife cuts both ways. Are you real if you’re never seen? The struggle is to remain active, amorphous, and becoming in a world vying for static and fixed.

We’re living through a moment of urgency. There’s a monster in the room. It hides in the shadows, seeps out through the walls, and permeates the very air we breathe.

We built this. And now we must reckon with the monster of our own making.

The rhythmic repetition of anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric hits the shores of my being like crashing waves. This is my breakwater.