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British artist John Walter will transform Artlink’s gallery space into a multimedia, multi-sensory and immersive show exploring the relationship between visual culture and HIV today.
Alien Sex Capsule is formalised around the ‘cruise maze’ – a structure common to sex clubs and gay sauna. Using the maze as a directive mechanism Walter’s guides the viewer through a carnival like space filled with painting, sculptural and video pieces converging conversation and research on the complex subject of contemporary sexual health today.
Through this interactive process Walter’s intention is that the visitor is fully immersed into it a multi-sensory yet welcoming environment in which hospitality, fortune-telling and comedy are all used to introduce difficult issues to a wide audience and make the subject palatable and interesting with a bit of fun and light humour thrown in.
Alien Sex Capsule is a capsule version of Walter’s 2015 exhibition Alien Sex Club, which was previously exhibited at Ambika P3 in London and at Homotopia festival in Liverpool.
The exhibition is part of Square Peg, a diversity and disability arts programme funded by Hull 2017. It follows on from LGBT 50, a week-long celebration of LGBT+ culture across the arts, marking the 50thanniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 that decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men in England and Wales.
Dr John Walter is an artist based in London. He graduated from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford in 2001, the Slade School of Fine Art in London with an MFA in 2003, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the USA in 2012, and was awarded a PhD in 2017 from the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at The University of Westminster in London.
Recent exhibitions include: Coming out, 2017, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Dark Side of the Moob, Vogue Fabrics, London, 2016; Alien Sex Club, Ambika P3, London and Camp & Furnace, Liverpool, 2015; Courtship Disorder, White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, London, 2015. Trance Time, MODEL Gallery, Liverpool, 2014; Turn My Oyster Up, Whitstable Bienniale, 2014; The Rococo Riots, Vitrine Gallery, London, 2013 and The Oil Baron’s Club, Smart Gallery, Aberdeen, 2012. His work has been supported by funding from The Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. He was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship at The British School at Rome 2006-8. His work is held by a number of public collections including The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford
Artlink, 87 Princes Avenue, Hull, HU5 3QP
