Ange Harry Bateman
Ange Harry Bateman's practice explores the intersections of gender, time, and performance through personal histories of play, drag, and transformation. Rooted in early imaginative role play and extended through drag king performance, their work investigates the politics of play as both inquiry and resistance, positioning drag as a strategy that disrupts dominant ideologies and fixed notions of gender. This is achieved by engaging with queer temporality where past and present overlap and identity is continually re-staged. Their studio practice focuses on reanimating male characters from history. Through performance, play, costume, props, gesture, and facial hair, they reconfigure historical masculinities as layered, speculative identities. Working across multiple mediums including photography, stop-motion video, paintings, prints, collages, and object-based assemblages they extend and re-imagine these characters, drawing them from the past into the present. By 'dragging time,' the practice collapses temporal boundaries, transforming historical masculinities into layered, speculative identities that connect ancestral histories with contemporary queer experiences.
