Luis Juárez of Revista Balam presents a window installation at Printed Matter Chelsea that explores representations of societal nonconformity in the convergent worlds of queerness and sex work. The project puts on view an offering of photo-based artists’ books and magazines that portray subversive intimacies, histories of oppression, found communities, and expressions of gender both performed and inhabited.

Queer and trans people throughout history have found an alternative form of survival in sex work, often in the face of systems that discriminate against sexual minorities who refuse to assimilate. This labor can provide paths to economic stability that may not otherwise exist — easing the struggle to make the pursuit of pleasure, bodily autonomy, and expressions of identity more possible and more free.

Referencing the flirty design vernacular of the popular papelitos de oferta sexual that adorn public spaces in Latin America to advertise local sex services, the installation seeks to promote Juárez’s curated selection with flyers that personify each publication, enticing the viewer to pick them up and take them home. Through this exchange, these narratives of marginalized identities and labors are afforded further witness and respect — affirming that sex work is work and the pleasure of LGBTIQ+ people is powerful in its boundlessness.

Luis Juárez, Director of Balam, creates this project in connection to the magazine’s ninth issue, Nuevas Masculinidades (New Masculinities), which deconstructs codified notions of white, cis masculinity and disperses visions of transgressive masculine experiences from an international group of queer and trans photographers and writers.

Browse the on-display publications here.

Join us for a reception at on Wednesday, April 24 5–7PM to mark the opening of both 0800-TAKE-ME-HOME and Kaghazi Pairahan: Publishing & Resistance in South Asia, an exhibition from Editions JOJO at Printed Matter Chelsea.

Luis Juárez is an editor, curator and cultural practitioner in the field of photography, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He manages artistic projects and produces books, magazines, exhibitions and art fairs. Editor and director of Balam, a contemporary photography magazine based in Latin America. He is founder and director of MIGRA, a collective that arises from the need to generate a community space for platforming and supporting printed art matter. Organizing MIGRA, the Buenos Aires Art Book Fair. Juárez is a member of the Argentina Trans Memory Archive, a space for the protection, construction, and vindication of trans memory.

Balam is an independent magazine of contemporary photography based in Buenos Aires. Through themes aimed at exposing the multiple realities and accompanying the struggles of minorities and dissidences, it promotes authors who seek to express and project themselves in a territory without distinction of borders. Its publication aims to transform, make visible, question and (re)invent critical discourses that enter into dialogue with social, cultural and political issues from an anti-hegemonic stance and with a poetic effect/affect, unusual in traditional photographic practice.

This display is a part of the Printed Matter Window Installation series.