ABSTRACT
The artist and poet Travis Alabanza posted a text on their Instagram account expressing their sadness and exasperation at the news:I am angry that our basic desires for happiness, safety and acceptance have to be fought for. Cassils is a white transmasculine artist whose understanding of transgender self-representation and of violence has little in common with the experience of being a Black transfeminine woman like Che or Alabanza. Uncertainties around representation and self-representation inform their artistic practice. Their art denounces violence inflicted on gender non-conforming bodies, particularly physical violence, the violence of fetishization and the violence caused by normative ideals of beauty. The artworks Cassils has produced with Black, which reference gay white male erotic imagery, celebrate the gender non-conforming body. Jessica Lynn Posner, who witnessed the performance, has explained that Cassils stood on a white pedestal alongside a retractable funnel, a litre bottle of water and an orange medical bottle half-filled with urine.
