The Queer Gospel From The Bureau of Queer Art

This exhibition is a Queer gospel of worship—worship of sexuality, gender, transgression, and intimacy. We are interested in devotion as a practice: the rituals of becoming, the ethics of touch, the altars we build in bedrooms and dance floors and daily care. Here, the sacred is not granted by institutions. It is made—through attention, pleasure, transformation, and community. We invite work that treats desire as knowledge and the body as a living archive—work that doesn’t just depict intimacy, but behaves like a ritual.

Build an altar to a body part, a gesture, a garment, a name, a pronoun, a kink, a transition milestone, a lover, a friend.
Make a relic from Queer life: something touched, worn, saved, hidden, smuggled, repaired.

Write a prayer that isn’t addressed to God. Who is it addressed to? Desire? The future? The self? The beloved?

Stage a ritual of becoming—the moment gender shifts, slips, cracks, reforms.

Show the ethics of touch: consent as sacred law, tenderness as doctrine, care as practice.

Transgression without cliché: what line did you cross that actually changed you?

The choir: show us community worship—collective rhythm, shared heat, shared grief, shared joy.

Rewrite the icon: invent new saints, new mythologies, new symbols—without begging permission from the old ones.

Confession as liberation: what truth becomes powerful when spoken out loud?

Devotion to the everyday: the holy mundane—laundry, medication, hormones, texting “home safe?”, water, sleep, cooking for someone.

clarity of intention (what is being worshiped, and why?)

emotional intelligence (desire with consequence; intimacy with ethics.

formal inventiveness (not just illustration of sex/gender—an artwork that acts like a ritual)

risk (not necessarily explicitness—risk can be tenderness, vulnerability, refusal, truth)