That Moment When It Happens or Doesn’t

That Moment When It Happens or Doesn’t brings the work of artist and photographer Fin Serck-Hanssen and writer Nate Lippens into dialogue for the first time at Camera Doppia. Serck-Hanssen and Lippens create work that attends to the infinite forms that a queer touch, rather than a queer image or story, can take in the very act of recording them.

The exhibition presents a selection of previously unseen photographs drawn from Serck-Hanssen’s five-decade-long archive. The selection has unfolded along a path that was not determined in advance, resisting a discursive mode of selecting and sequencing. Images from different years are exhibited without following a precise chronological order. Far from constituting a diary in photographic form or an occasion to rethink lost narratives or archival gaps, the works on display share a different form of pathos: the persistence of desire and its potential to offer another way of relating to the past and its legacy.

In response to this gesture of cruising and visual promiscuity, Lippens has written an original text that moves between Serck-Hanssen’s photographs and his own memories and encounters with artists, writers, images, and other archives. As Serck-Hanssen selects fragments of longing from his archive, Lippens embraces this fragmentariness in his writing. It becomes one of the ways to express a state of suspension, where desire lingers, dense and intense, without ever resolving itself, yet recognized in both its ambiguity and singularity.