LONDON.- Hales will present Staging Resistance, a look at Tessa Boffin's, Rotimi Fani-Kayode's and Sunil Gupta's trailblazing work from the 1980s, a pivotal moment for Queer British photography. The show coincides with Sunil Gupta's retrospective, Life with a Camera, 1970 - Now, on view at Kettle's Yard (Cambridge, UK) from September 2026 to January 2027, and Where We Touch the Archive, an ambitious touring project focused on the work of Tessa Boffin by Devonshire Collective, on view in Eastbourne, UK (July - September 2026). At the same time, Rotimi Fani-Kayode is featured in the Barbican Art Gallery's Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, (through September 2026, also touring to Art Institute of Chicago, MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles).

The continued institutional attention given to the work of Tessa Boffin, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Sunil Gupta underscores both the groundbreaking nature and the enduring relevance of their practices, each shaped by participation in key moments of queer and photographic history in 1980s London. Gupta and Boffin met in the city in 1988 and went on to collaborate on several projects, including the seminal exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (1990). The show and its accompanying publication also posthumously featured work by Fani-Kayode, who died from AIDS-related complications in late 1989. A year earlier, Fani-Kayode and Gupta had been among the co-founders of the Association of Black Photographers, now Autograph ABP, a non-profit organisation that continues to champion photography engaging with race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice. These intersecting collaborations reveal a closely connected network of artists who used photography, publishing and institution-building as forms of cultural and political activism.

Staging Resistance brings together three distinct bodies of work created against the cultural and political backdrop of 1980s UK: an environment largely shaped by the AIDS crisis and the introduction of Section 28 (1988), a controversial law that prohibited local authorities from "promoting homosexuality". Showcasing Gupta's "Pretended" Family Relationships, Fani-Kayode's Bodies of Experience and Boffin's Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex, the show considers photography not as a neutral record but as a means of constructing queer identities, intimacies and communities. Using portraiture, montage, allegory and theatrical staging, the artists in the exhibition produced images which not only emphasized alternative forms of visibility, but underscored desire and kinship which the dominant culture either denied or could not imagine.





In "Pretended" Family Relationships, Sunil Gupta reclaims the language of Section 28 to challenge its assumptions. Portraits of same-sex couples, many interracial, are combined with documentary-style images of protests against Section 28 and accompanied by the poetry of Stephen Dodd, the artist's partner at the time. In these images, Gupta links domestic intimacy with political resistance: everyday settings such as kitchens and bedrooms become sites of quiet defiance, exposing the fiction that queer relationships are somehow "pretended."

While Gupta's series grounds queer identity in ordinary life, Rotimi Fani-Kayode takes the discourse into the photographic studio, transforming it into a ritual space of spirituality, fantasy and self-invention. Centring around the Black male body, Bodies of Experience explores the intersections of race, sexuality, diasporic experience and Yoruba spirituality through symbolic, highly staged compositions. In these works, figures emerge from dramatic chiaroscuro, bend beneath symbolic objects or adopt gestures that suggest sacrifice, ecstasy and passion, acknowledging both vulnerability and desire.

Boffin's Angelic Rebels: Lesbians and Safer Sex similarly refuses to separate pleasure from survival. Created in 1989 in response to the marginalisation of lesbians within AIDS discourse, the series reimagines the angel as a sexually autonomous lesbian figure. Wings, harnesses and safer-sex materials coexist within a deliberately theatrical mise-en-sc�ne, combining instruction with fantasy and demonstrating that political photography and safer-sex education need not suppress pleasure to be effective.

Exhibited together, these three distinct series offer a glimpse into the vibrant community of like-minded politically-aware queer creatives living and working in 1980s London-a community that refused to conform to narratives of erasure. From this refusal emerged a rich, multidimensional body of work that insists queer life cannot be understood through a single lens or defined solely by oppression. Instead, the works present desire, intimacy, and imagination as forms of resistance, demonstrating that representation is not only about being seen, but also about creating new possibilities for living and belonging

Tessa Boffin (b.1960 - d. 1993 London, UK) was a pioneering artist and a key organising figure in the UK's photography scene, working between the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Boffin gained a BA (Hons) Degree in Photographic Arts (Theory and Practice) from Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster) in 1986 and an MA in Critical Theory from University of Sussex, UK. Despite a brief oeuvre, Boffin developed a complex body of photographic work which explored gender, sex positivity and societal and political issues. In staged scenes Boffin championed lesbian visibility and the actualization of queer identity through explorations of fantasy. Boffin had a bold, ground-breaking practice at a time of little visual representation and acknowledgement of queer desire. The artist's national touring exhibition Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch the Archive, which originated at the Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne (18 July - 5 September 2026), will travel to BACKLIT, Nottingham (18 September - 17 October 2026), Photoworks Festival, Brighton (2 - 18 October 2026), and Aspex Portsmouth (2 December 2026 - 28 February 2027).

Sunil Gupta MBE (b.1953 New Delhi, India) has, over a career spanning six decades, maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing a rich body of work that has pioneered a unique social and political commentary. The artist's diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration and queer identity. He has remained dedicated to advocating the visibility of queer identity, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history. This autumn, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge will present Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 - Now (19 September 2026 - 31 January 2027), the most comprehensive survey of the artist's work to date. Recent institutional presentations of Gupta's work include The Lovers at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2025) and Love and Light - A Sight of Infinite Possibilities at Chennai Photo Biennale (2025).

Rotimi Fani-Kayode was born in 1955, in Lagos, Nigeria to a prominent Yoruba family before moving to England following the outbreak of civil war. He later studied at Georgetown University and the Pratt Institute in the USA, before settling permanently in London in 1983 where he lived and worked until his untimely death in 1989. Fani-Kayode is a highly influential figure in the history of art who, despite a tragically brief career, produced a complex body of photographic work that explored themes of race, sexuality, spirituality, and the self. At the core of Fani-Kayode's art was an emphasis on difference and otherness. Recent institutional presentations include Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion, the first North American survey of the artist's work and archives, organised by Autograph, London and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. The exhibition originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts (22 September 2024 - 5 January 2025) before touring to The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, CA (28 February - 25 May 2025.)