Rosewood Amsterdam | 'Dance Like No One Is Watching'

The exhibition borrows its title from a video work by Ghanaian-Dutch artist Joel Quayson, whose practice orbits his own layered identity, tracing the tectonics of faith, culture, sexuality and gender identity. Where Quayson’s Dance like no one is watching compiles sequences of the artist dancing in an empty room, celebrating the emancipatory power of a solitary performance, How do you feel? – presented here – offers a more vulnerable self-portrait, in which Quayson sheds conservative clothing to dress again in colourful party wear. In pointing to the clash of personal desires and societal expectations, and in offering a private scene for the viewer’s consumption, Quayson’s works reflect a push-and-pull between the will to be seen and the ramifications of visibility.

In the face of similar pressures, the work of American artist Michael Bailey-Gates establishes a space of joyous affirmation – where gender binaries and heteronormative conventions dissolve into distant memory. In their images, the artist poses for exuberant portraits with a playful cast of friends, toying with the scope and limits of viewers’ expectations. Carefully-selected props, rather than elaborate digital post-processing techniques, offer Bailey-Gates’ work an added dimension. But beneath the riotous celebration lie more serious concerns – here, the camera is an essential tool for grappling identities and self-representation, whilst nudity becomes a powerful metaphor for the naked vulnerability of seeking acceptance.

Set against the noisy, riotous colour of Smith and Bailey-Gates' works, Pacifico Silano’s pieces carry quieter, weightier undertones, speaking deeply all the while to his own identity – and to that of a wider LGBTQ+ community. Spurred on by the erasure of his uncle’s story, who was lost to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Silano turned to gay pornographic magazines that preceded or aligned with this time period; the kind of images his uncle might have looked at. Rephotographing sections of the magazines as a foundation for new works, Silano highlights the tension between the sexual liberation of the 1970s and the tragic sense of loss that followed, as well as dissecting representations of an archetypal masculinity that the magazines proffered.

Completing the show is a work by Martine Gutierrez, whose large-scale solo exhibition, Wunderkind, takes over Amsterdam’s Huis Marseille from June 27. First presented in billboard form by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Supremacy draws on the visual codes of advertising to examine how archetypes of femininity are constructed and circulated in the public sphere. We see the artist assume the role of lingerie model, sprawled out across a pink rug for a campaign shoot; all the while, a series of dolls disrupts the air of stylised glamour, tugging at her hair and prodding her body, as if mirroring the sexist pressures of societal beauty standards. In an era of performative politics and corporate ‘allyship’, Gutierrez demonstrates how whiteness and gender normativity are bound to beauty ideals, questioning the extent to which a brand could ever represent those who deviate from these norms. In this context, the work’s title functions just as fittingly as an ominous brand name.