ABSTRACT
This collaborative chapter explores two museum photographs depicting the same sculpture: a Roman copy of a Greek fourth-century BCE bust of Dionysus, housed at the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The first photograph is an anonymous twentieth-century reproduction – the label Arianna printed beneath, crossed out with ballpoint – found by artist Åsa Johannesson in the Eugenie Strong Collection. The second is a new photograph of the bust taken in response to the archival image by Johannesson in 2017. At stake here are the simultaneously personal, political, and philosophical problematics of nonbinary trans identities in the museum. As nonbinary trans researchers working from the position of artistic research through practice, we explore the assemblage of associations and resonances generated by these images of a bust labeled both Arianna and Dionysus, female and male. This assemblage cannot be reduced to the zero-sum field of true/false. Instead, it suggests a fictive mode of research, demonstrating the complex and paradoxical operations of what we label nonbinary difference: a generative potential to foreground instabilities, rather than a given identity to be represented. We propose that a sensitivity to nonbinary difference can help to address the “politics of absence” of trans identities in the museum.
