AFTER EDEN - Queer Intimacies Beyond Origin

After Eden takes the biblical myth of origin not as theology, but as one of the earliest narratives through which Western culture organises desire and determines who is excluded from that order. The project is proposed to take place during Pride Month, bringing together artists from diverse diasporic backgrounds working across image, installation, and moving image. Initiated by HSIUNG and curated by an Asian queer team, the exhibition is grounded not in observation, but in lived experience, shaped by migration, belief, and queer identity. 

Before Eve, there was another form of intimacy in Eden.God and Adam moved within a closed relation, a proximity that precedes both the concept of solitude and the existence of sexual difference. The introduction of Eve did not simply add a character to the story. It restructured intimacy itself and established the heterosexual couple as its central and legitimate form. In doing so, the earlier intimacy between creator and creation is displaced from the narrative. After Eden names this rupture. It marks a moment where same-sex intimacy is overwritten and where queer bodies and desires are subsequently positioned outside what is defined as “natural” or “sacred”. 

Drawing from queer diaspora theory, the exhibition understands displacement not only as geographic, but as structural. To be expelled from Eden is not a singular myth, but a recurring condition, one that manifests across different cultures, religions, and social systems. Desire becomes named as deviance. Bodies are excluded from family, from religious communities, and from national belonging. For queer subjects, diaspora often begins at the point where belonging becomes impossible. The works brought together in After Eden emerge from this double position. They are shaped by cultural memory and belief, yet never fully contained within them. The body becomes both archive and argument, not as evidence of trauma, but as persistence after erasure.