London Trans+ Pride 2024

Nothing represents the spirit of the times and the resilience of the community as acutely and accurately as the annual London Trans+ Pride. Pride is a protest! It’s always a joy to support and document this ever growing event.

Papa Loko at Archives London

I documented the summer edition of Papa Loko. There was an opening ceremony & Kirtan by Vaun. PopliHerrero debuted their installation, A Totem Reflection. Othon, Wandson Maxx, Black Venus and Darren Black kept everyone warm with their sets.

London Trans+ Pride 2023

Queer Art(ists) Now - Private View

I documented the opening night of the 2022 edition of the Queer Art(ist) Now exhibition. Curated by Andrew Ellerby and presented as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Festive, the show boasts work from 70 artists.

Adam Wilson Holmes - Adriann Ramirez - Aidan Reece Cawrey - Alex Billingham - Alex Matraxia - Alice Norfield - Amit Vadher - ANDI - Angelique Nagovskaya - Annalisa Hayes - Antonio Marguet - Autojektor - Bex Massey - Bobby Redmond - Chester Tenneson - Chierol Lai - Christopher Matthews - Craig Waddell - Cris - Daisy Blower - Daniel Jaen - Daniel Mark Welsh - Danielle Nebula - Diana Puntar - Diogo Duarte - Eleanor Louise West - Elijas Grybe - Eliza Goroya - Emily Witham, Esther Maltby - Fab Josh - Gsus Lopez - Guy Burch - Hat - Hayley Wall - J Frank - Jack Ryder x Fartun Abdulle - James Robert Morrison - Janine Shroff - Jeni Snell - João Saramago - Julieta Tetelbaum - Kit Griffiths - Krishna Shanthi - Lady Kitt, Lauren John Joseph - Liam Sielski Waters - Liberty Antonia Sadler - Luke Nichols - Maria Arvaniti - Maria Rosamojo - Matthew Gale - Miguel Maldonado - Mitko Karakolev - Mollie Balshaw - Nan Carreira - Nigel Grimmer - Oran Rose x Tâm Nguyễn x Sam Farrow - Orlando Myxx - Paul Sammut - Richard Sawdon Smith - Roux Malherbe - Sadie Lee - Sam Wingate - Sidney Westenskow - Simon the Last - Smart Barnett - Sophie Ansell - stav B - Studio Prokopiou - Taryn O'Reilly - Tom Coates - Tom Maryniak - Wayne lucas - Xinyuan Ma

Queer Art(ists) Now is hosted by Space Station Sixty-Five in Kennington and it’s open to visitors till 8th October.

In This Smoking Chaos - Production photography

I delivered production photography for In This Smoking Chaos, playing 15 – 24 September as part of Queen’s Theatre’s Blueprint Festival. ‘Part theatre, part art installation, part cinema – artist and designer Laura Ann Price and her team of collaborators have devised a raw human drama of 31 scenes in 31 minutes. It will be played by two performers, who act, dance and perform spoken word poetry and create live soundscapes.’

Laura’s collaborators are: Raisa Daya, Deputy Stage Manager; Charlie Derrar Director, Dramaturg and Lyricist; Yael Elisheva Performer and Deviser; Bar Groisman Movement Director and Deviser; Tatenda Matsvai Performer, Deviser and Lyricist; Stephen Pemble Lighting Designer and Anna Short Sound Designer.

London Trans Pride 2022

It was my third time at London Trans Pride, and as ever, it felt important to be there and support our trans siblings. I took some photos. Thank you everyone!

Kaos presents Samuel Kerridge

Young Queer Clothes Swap at the Old Diorama Arts Centre

I took some photos at the Young Queer Clothes Swap event hosted by the Old Diorama Arts Centre. People could socialise while browsing and picking whatever they fancied from the range of donated items. They could also get a haircut.

Mark T Cox - photoshoot and poster image

I’m happy to present the final product of the poster image photoshoot for Mark T Cox. Mark will perform at The Sugar Club during Dublin Pride in June.

Hester Stefan Chillingworth in rehearsal at the Old Diorama

I documented Hester Chillingworth’s rehearsals at the Old Diorama Arts Centre. They are at an early stage of working on a new piece.

Kaos presents Ancient Methods

After one month break, Kaos returned to Electrowerkz over the Easter weekend. This edition brought back Ancient Methods, who last time played Kaos in 2018. Other acts of the night were Less than human, Choronzon and Lupus. Enjoy my photo set from the night.

Kaos presents Kris Baha

Loudest Whispers 2022 at Old Diorama Arts Centre

I started my collaboration with Old Diorama Arts Centre with documenting the opening of the Loudest Whispers exhibition.

‘Curated and presented by The Arts Project, the exhibition celebrates the strength and power of the LGBTQ+ community, including work from 34 artists linked to an open category and the theme of ‘Politics in Art’. It features both professionally trained and self-taught outsider artists as well as creative supporters of LGBTQ+ rights.’

Kaos XVIII Anniversary with Rrose

Kaos London presents JXN CØCÕ, Faux Naif, Oliver, Dahc Dermur VIII, Vilhelm and Ubu Noir

Physical Distancing Exhibition at Electrowerkz

Recently my work have been included in Physical Distancing, an exhibition curated by Parma Ham. The group show boasting some photographic work and installation pieces documenting and created in response to alt-night life took over the top floor of Electrowerkz in Angel.

Find out more about the show on Electrowerk’z blog and Parma Ham’s website.

Beside showing three prints of photographs taken at Kaos and Klub Verboten, I also had an opportunity to contribute to the film programme presented during the opening night. The video based on my photo essay ‘Scenes of Utter Chaos’ (scroll down to read the piece) is a response to the theme of physical distancing and as such explores the experience of disconnection from memories and people representing the tangible world.

Scenes of Utter Kaos

KAOS was launched in November 2003 at Madame JoJo’s in Soho. Over the years they have staged under- ground parties all over London. From the faded opulence of JoJo's to the Dickensian squalor of an under- ground pissoir (Public Life, Spitalfields) via the neo-gothic splendour of the 291 Gallery and the eccentric grunge of The Speaker Palace to the crepuscular underworld of Stunners [...] KAOS currently run monthly underground warehouse parties at the gritty and industrial Electrowerkz club in Angel, Islington, a 19th cen- tury former metal works installed with a powerful turbosound system.*1

With a brave yet coherent curation of sonic soundscapes - merging elements of techno, post-industrial, modular synthwave and rhythmic noise - KAOS is devoted to music and is about sonic experiences. Throughout the years, it has become a well-known stage for both emerging and established sonic artists from the local as well as the global scene. It has also become a home for the crowd attending the nights - the people who make it a visually rich and queer space. They have created a community around KAOS and they continue to contribute their energy into the night’s vibe.

Electrowerkz was where I attended a KAOS night for the first time and where eventually, in my pursuit of becoming more of a participant in the scene, I also began my adventure into photographing it. I created my first photo report for KAOS’ 11th anniversary back in 2014. It looked like I was late to the party, but this didn’t stop me from instantly falling in love with it. Encouraged by the ‘see you in the darkness’ slogan, ap- pearing in Lee Adams’ online reminders about approaching events, I embarked on the task of discovering what that darkness involved, learning how to navigate it in order to extract, expose and create a photo- graphic representation of it. This shift into new settings came with fresh photographic angles and expanded my interest in movement, which branched out into three interweaving sub-categories: kinetics, optics and politics. The task was to create immersive visualisations of these dynamics. I was interested in a party ex- perience and a club photography opportunity that would have the feel of an alternative reality. KAOS pro- vided and delivered. The party, though it can be seen as dark, is a safe haven for its community. I discov- ered that there is flourishing life in the darkness. In low light I found high energy.

KAOS is a perfect space for individual self-expression and for group rituals of hedonism and release. It is also, like queer club culture in general, about the creativity of out of the box thinkers - club kids and moth- ers, performers and ‘shape shifters’. It’s about experiments with outfits and make-up, and evolving con- cepts of beauty. Club photography will always be about documenting it all. Yet, with my approach to this genre, I always intend to see beyond looks as finished products. Looks unravel their full potential when they are entangled in a club space; when they become part of the narratives about friendship, love, trust, joy, hedonism, humanism, inclusiveness, community and vibe. A queer club night is a setting where all these factors occur and interweave. My photographs showing the KAOS community dancing and sometimes pos- ing for the camera (or dancing and posing simultaneously) are a record of the trust negotiated between us. They are also documents of the process of establishing our shared sense of belonging. The images send a message about the joy and the pride felt in finding a tribe, a ‘home’, a place, which is safe and where there is no judgement.

People tend to contest the presence of photographers and their cameras within an underground party set- ting. They see taking photographs at a night club as an invasion. It can also be seen as a sign of the com- mercialisation of a party. Taking photographs can signify a certain validation of the rituals of socialising and self-expression. I approach my presence as a club photographer as a task of tuning in to the vibe of the crowd. As the night progresses, taking pictures becomes a collaborative project of recording memories and celebrating the moment we are all in. A queer club night is a spectacle but also a participatory performance - an ‘open stage’. I like to think that my photographer’s gaze goes unnoticed. Sometimes it does, but some- times there’s a clear, spontaneous collaboration with the dancers who become ‘performers’. Preferably (and usually) these situations are candid but sometimes we only pretend they are. Some photos pass as candid thanks to their subject’s careful self-direction, and thanks also to the trust that has been established be- tween us. I endeavour to convey the performativity of these situations through some of my images in order to tell the story of an ontological relationship between a photographer and an event (a club night). Perfor- mance depends on documentation as it gains authority by being recorded. And documentation too depends on performance, for there would be nothing to document without performance*2 – their relation seems to be perpetual.

My photographs from KAOS speak of and record movement understood in three different ways:
- Firstly, movement as in the kinetics of dance: I harvest imagery of spontaneous choreographies; I docu- ment the beauty of people losing themselves in dance; I record elements of escapism and the pleasure of interacting with the sensory experience of the club. I want my photographs to communicate both the ele- gance and the intensity of the scenes witnessed in the club. I strive to transfer these energetic, intangible factors into an arresting visual representation.
- Secondly, these images are optical representations of movement as the passage of light and time. Often they visualise time in a disrupted sense - I allow a certain blurriness, for textures of grit and noise to appear in my images. I let light take its time as it works its way through the darkness, as it sneaks between bodies, energy and smoke; as it disperses and mixes its lumens coming from different sources. Photographing these seemingly perfect, energetic and highly charged moments is an expression of the desire to pause time. The darkened club space has an extra-temporal quality. It screams: Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!*3. These words echo within the still images of action captured in situ.
- Finally, my photos document queer club nights as a fertile ground for movement as in politics and subcul-

tures. Dance can be seen as a political statement*4. The same applies to queer love - creating communi- ties and sustaining human bonds. Dance is about conversations, inspiration and guidance. It is about learning from each other. Photography becomes an element and a record of the cultural-political ex- change taking place in the club between all of those involved in the music, the fashion and the communi- ty. It also sends a message to the wider audience exposed to these photos, a message about the exis- tence of this parallel world.

These club photography experiences have led me to the realisation that I’ve been looking for common de- nominators across different genres of my photographic work. For me, the club space became a platform for experimenting with a mix of the approaches that I usually employ in theatre and dance production photog- raphy, portraiture, fashion, documentary or conceptual assignments. Hundreds of the photos in my KAOS archive are charged with the prolonging and the preservation of moments of movement, drama, creativity, storytelling, ambiguity, performativity and self-expression.

My pictures from KAOS present the paradox of power, fragility and transience found in queer club culture. They keep alive the memories of the place where we can experience feeling powerful and vulnerable, and where we feel safe expressing both of these states as they are experienced through our bodies and minds. During the current pandemic, these photos have become even more valuable. I can’t help but feel a sense of loss. I hope that the dancing rituals of KAOS will commence again soon. I miss you all.

I would like to thank Lee and Chadd but also Adam, Aga, Alan, Alex, Al/ice/ex, Andreas, Andro, Andrzej, Barkosina, BTK, Christos, Claus, Cuco, Danny, Giammarco, Harry, Jason, Josh, Judith, Jun, Katy, Loops, Luisa, Luke, Lulu, Mak, Micol, Olha, Oliver, Parma Ham, Pie, Safrash, Salvia, Stefano, Teresio, Timmy and everyone else, who I ever photographed also without knowing their name. Special thanks to the co editors of this text, Max Aldous-Allison and Freya Caldwell.

#scenesofutterkaos, #lowlighthighenergy

Zbigniew Kotkiewicz, London 2020

Instagram @zbigniewkotkiewicz Website zkotkiewicz.com

*1 Source: Kaos’ ‘about’ section on Resident Advisor Promoter’s page https://www.residentadvisor.net/promoter.aspx? id=46452

*2 Philip Auslander, The Performativity of Performance Documentation PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art Volume 28, Issue 3, September 2006 p.1-10

*3 Quote from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

*4 “If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution” - quote from an anarchist political activist and writer Emma Goldman

Wesley Hartwell - AWKWARD PARTY, London Fashion Week

I documented Wesley Hartwell's AWKWARD PARTY collection presentation. The event took place during London Fashion Week and was hosted by The Queen Adelaide of Cambridge Heath.

Kaos - The Restart

So it happened, after 18 months of the pandemic induced hiatus Kaos returned to Electrowerkz with Dahc Dermur VIII, Proteus, Fairground of Tears, Choronzon, LAW334 and Ireen Amnes.

There were some familiar and some fresh faces. There were also new light and sound systems. The party also expanded to the middle floor room.

Here is a selection of my photographs from the night…

The return of/to Pink Glove

Scenes of Utter Kaos

My photo essay on Kaos, club photography and queer night life found its happy home on Electrowerkz blog.

2024 update - As the venue is under new management their website content has been amended and the piece isn’t available there anymore.