In Conversation with Professor Rattanamol Singh Johal, Curator of Wallach Art Gallery's Homage: Queer Lineages on Video

You step through a latex curtain to enter a dark chamber separated from the rest of the gallery to watch P. Staff's video piece The Foundation. Your attention is fixed on the clips of the archives, the underground queer parties, the foaming bed, but you can still hear the reciting of poems from Rirkri Tiravanjia's 2008 video work Untitled (John Giorno reads) on the other side of the gallery. 

Entrance to P. Staff's The Foundation, 2015

The exhibition "Homage: Queer Lineages on Video" presents eight video works from the Akeroyd Collection. In my meeting with him and his catalogue essay, the curator Professor Rattanoamol Singh Johal discusses how the exhibited artists were making works that connect with historical queer figures and how the relationships between these works were established in the space of the Wallach. 

Installation view of Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (John Giorno reads), 2008

With its large windows and curved walls that never close off into individual showrooms, the Wallach is an iconic architecture in Columbia's campus extension but, as Professor Johal suggests, not a space conducive to exhibiting media work. 

Professor Johal ensured that the works that requested for their own audio-spaces were granted their own headphone sets. For example, the viewing space of Kang Sung Lee's 2018 piece Garden is supplied with headsets and a bench facing away from the gallery to foster intimate spectatorship. 

Nevertheless, it is inevitable that there will be sound leakage in the open space of the Wallach. However, Professor Johal notes that this also makes possible the physical and conceptual opportunity for light and sound to move fluidly.

"The clash is going to be productive,"

he said. The cross-bleeding was a relationality that was fundamental to the exhibition's theme. Its idea of Homage came out of the Akeroyd Collection with no previous literature. The subtitle "Queer Lineage on Video" focuses on forming nonlinear, non-direct ties as queer relationality. In other words, instead of focusing on queer identity, Professor Johal centers the exhibition on alternative ways of forming relations. 

Kang Seung Lee, Professor Johal uses as an example, converges together historical figures that may not have known each other but were connected through their practices and activism. In the same way that the exhibited artists are creating their own cartography of queer lineages without a predetermined convention, there is no prescribed path in the exhibition. Viewers flow to and fro with the melange of East and West, flights of sound and light. 

It is not just the space of the Wallach that realizes the conceptual complexity of Professor Johal's exhibition but also its identity. The Wallach Art Gallery was established in 1986 with the renovation of Schermerhorn Hall for Columbia's Department of Art History and Archaeology. While the Wallach was still located in Schermerhorn Hall, its 2013 exhibition Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin's "Selves" impacted Professor Johal. He describes the Wallach as a place that has always been presenting art that was politically powerful but overlooked. The Wallach's focus on practices that are speaking from the margins allows for its facilitating of critical understanding in contemporary arts. It also allows for the situating of the "Homage" exhibition within a history of uplifting underappreciated voices. 

Still view of Tony Cokes's SM BNGRZ 1 + 2, 2021

Professor Johal has worked with Associate Director of Education and Public Programs Jennifer Mock to create orientation programs that welcome Columbia's freshmen class of 2030. It allows more people to understand the rich history of Columbia's art historical scholarship, view the Wallach's critical engagement with contemporary art and participate in discourses surrounding queer bodies and relationalities. 

Indeed, Professor Johal emphasizes the truth that curatorial work, like the way the exhibited video works were made, is collaborative. The Director and Chief Curator, Betti-Sue Hertz, approached Professor Johal after encountering the Akeroyd Collection. Professor Johal looked through everything on the Collection's website and spoke with the Collection's curator, who sent him resources on the works. 

It is not just the conceptual part of the exhibition that was collaborative, as Professor Johal speaks of the physical installation of the exhibition: "nothing happens without the staff at the Wallach; the installation team were tweaking volumes to the last minute." The calibration for the exhibiting of video art, Professor Johal claims, is much more difficult than for other traditional art forms like painting. 

Professor Johal has invited Luke Fowler to conclude the closing of the exhibition on October 19th, to return to important topics in queer relationality and to point to the exhibition's legacies. Luke Fowler is an artist based in Glasgow and whose work is collaborative—he describes filmmaking as a "social practice" —and examines the way "minority … [lives] on [society's] edges." While Fowler's work is not in the exhibition, his works paid homage to English AIDS activists and were recently acquired by the Akeroyd Collection. Including his work in the space of the Homage exhibition would then ensure a continuation of the ideas of nonlinear, non-direct, queer relations. While the exhibition is at a closure, the discourses and inspirations it has generated continues to take flight.  

Still view of P. Staff's The Foundation, 2015

Thank you so much to Professor Johal for taking time to speak with me about his curatorial process.

1.  Fowler Luke, “Bio,” Luke Fowler, 2025, https://www.luke-fowler.com/about/bio/.