Veer to your left in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale and you’ll come across a painting bearing the words: “Anonymous Homosexual.” Round the corner, there’s a row of black-and-white pictures showing transfixed male viewers, seen from the back, watching a screen. Ah, the magic of cinema, you might think – except for all the boxes of tissues, indicating that this is a particular kind of cinema.
This is part of Being Alone, a body of work by the artist Dean Sameshima, an expanded version of which is also on show at Soft Opening in London. Sitting in an outdoor cafe in the Giardini, the Biennale’s main space, Sameshima says he visited five gay porn cinemas in Berlin, his adopted home, over a number of years, and decided to commemorate a culture that is disappearing due to hook-up apps. His pictures are enigmatic, melancholy and yet somehow seductive, the loitering silhouettes and shining screen expressing loneliness, escapism and perhaps a kind of defiance against the expectations of society.
