04 Aug Alex Bispham

Posted at 18:58h in 2025, Lecture by

Alex Bispham

LECTURE
Alex Bispham

Queer art, alchemy, and the tarot: on il/legibility and im/materiality 

This lecture explores how alchemy can enrich our understanding of queer artists who reimagine the tarot. Occult practices have long intersected with queer concerns, with their attention to alternative ways of knowing and radical change. Both exist more fluidly between the seen/unseen, the legible/illegible, and the material/immaterial than the “hidden” etymology of the word occult might lead us to believe. Occult practices can be particularly attractive to queer artists seeking to counter heteropatriarchal norms.

The practitioners Hilma’s Ghost, Devan Shimoyama, and the new mystics share not only a concern with the tarot’s imagery, but its propensity for enacting material change – from abstracting gendered bodies, through reimagining personal experiences, to building a digital cosmos. With a focus on tools and techniques, I will ask whether we can conceptualise their creative process as alchemical one, a fluid exchange of im/material properties.

Bio

Alex Bispham is a technical art historian currently writing her PhD on queer spirituality in contemporary art. Based at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, her research seeks to queer the distinction between materiality and immateriality: it examines how occult spiritual practices are translated into physical artworks, and how these artworks become tools for queer transformation.

She has a particular focus on how attending to marginalised figures and practices can expand our understanding of the canon. As those marginalised histories often don’t have a cohesive archive, her approach is based on what materials, and traces of tools, methods, and techniques can tell us about the unseen aspects of their practice.
Alex teaches art history, modern languages, and yoga and meditation. She previously held positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and Hôtel Drouot, Paris.