Biblification, the Classical Body and Homosociality (2020)
Photo collage and text | A0 poster (84 x 119 cm) In 1920 Dutchman, photographer, queer and amateur anthropologist Frank Scholten left the Netherlands on a pilgrimage to Palestine, stopping in Italy and Greece en route. He arrived in 1921 leaving at the end of 1923 – a period of great flux with the establishment of the British Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Armed with a camera and library of 6,000 books, he planned to produce a definitive illustrated bible totalling fourteen-volumes. His notes conflate religious narratives and image clippings, primarily of Western-authored artworks that included both religious subjects and classical statuary.
These posters consider the ambiguous ‘queer space’ which Scholten inhabited and imaged in his travels. On the one hand, the liberal overtones of a multi-confessional approach to the ‘Holy Land’ might reflect his conversion from the Dutch Reformed Church to Catholicism. On the other, queer subtexts in both the classical statuary and religious art that he referenced can be seen in the various homosocial spaces that he imaged.
Scholten shows us a Palestine that differs greatly from other European photographers – a multi-communal world in the throes of transition in which he clearly moved through multiple cultural spheres. His association with Jacob Israël de Haan, a queer, Jewish-Dutchman also in Palestine in the period, hints at the ways in which expatriate Dutch queers cut across social and cultural divides interacting with indigenous communities. Scholten’s corpus gives us glimpses into the ambiguous world of the early Mandate period in which queer designations undermined and problematised the dominant taxonomies of sexuality today.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS: ALMS conference, HKW, Berlin, June 2019Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival, Tunis, September 2022
related projects
Frank Scholten : Photographing Palestine - Film
Frank Scholten: Archaeology and Tourism in the ‘Holy Land’ - Exhibition
Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918-1948 - Book