Saturn Akin: An imaginary garden with real toads in them

An imaginary garden with real toads in them is a photography project that re-envisions transness and dysphoria through the lens of interspecies relationships. The series is influenced by the poetics of late modernist poet Marianne Moore, whose work represents non-human bodies without attempting to wholly capture or dominate them. An imaginary garden similarly conjures transspecies textures, qualities and essences without exploiting animal labour or seeking to replicate scientific ‘accuracy’.

Throughout the series, there is a leitmotif of torso imagery. The human torso is a mythologised, politicised and gendered part of the body; it is a site of struggle concerning sexualisation, breastfeeding, ideals of the ‘right’ kind of torso to fit a binary gendered system, and representation of post-op bodies. As this project explores, the historical development of body signal sensors for lie detection and surveillance is also rooted in this region of the body. Mixing images of my torso with non-human elements allows me to reclaim dysphoria from pathology, instead exploring possibilities of ‘becoming with’ that challenge queerphobic and humanist notions of the default, or ‘correct’, body.

Adopting a speculative approach, the use of 3D imagery, virtual fur, 3D collage and other imagined animalistic shapes, An imaginary garden creates a sensual, dreamlike aesthetic of undying queerness and future potential existence. This project transports Moore’s ethics into a contemporary posthuman visual offering, reclaiming the trans body from continuing legacies of control, pathologization and surveillance. It invites viewers of any gender into a space of fantastical embodiment.

Opening

Please join us for the exhibition's opening Friday 5th April, 6pm - 9pm.

Saturn Akin

Saturn Akin is a Glasgow-based multidisciplinary artist, working across performance, adornment making, 3D, and photography. Their art practice revolves around the conjuration of their own non-binary identity and is driven by the creation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of adornments, 3D objects and still-lifes. Through this intricate and generative process, Saturn Akin explores themes of transness, body signal technology, and mutualism/mutability within a Queer Ecological framework.

Narration plays pivotal roles in Saturn Akin's (3D) object-making process. Saturn Akin draws inspiration from renowned black and non-black feminist and transgender science-fiction authors like Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, and Bogi Takács.

The incorporation of non-human life forms in their objects and adornments underscores the concept of mutualism and envisions a Queer future rooted in transspecies relationships.