Free Tickets Reserved HERE

With guest DJ Luci Pina

In the midst of a noisy, fast, individualistic society Emma Bentley-Fox’s lens proers a personal and tender take on Leeds’ alternative queer party scene and communities. Emma’s work seems to gather beautifully still moments, energies and bodies from a position of intimate distance.

Part future-memorial and part live archive, Emma’s images of Leeds’ queer community are a confessional; oering kinship, vulnerability and a love letter to interdependence and solidarity. Her portraits, like their protagonists, exhibit acts of love and inevitable deance, in what can often feel like a hostile society for those under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. But beyond that, they are reverent, joyous and quivering in colour. A record for future selves and others.

Queer archives have often been misinterpreted, destroyed, and systematically erased from society’s memory. Through her image-making, Emma questions what she believes may be a specically ‘queer compulsion to archive, to collect’ arising from an erased or edited past. Asking ‘Can we nd our way back to ourselves through the careful process of collecting & sorting, through the care with which we wrap things, put them in boxes, carefully clean, repair, and le away.’

Emma, and her collaborators at Party Mom Society, cut their teeth in the basement of Hyde Park Book Club, with sweaty gatherings like anti-pageant Miss The Glam Monaco International Supreme, 2018. Their focus is on care and play, creating a mutual joyful refuge and a tender space that welcomes queer, questioning and non-conforming pasts, presents and futures. So often, queer joy, love and bodies are relegated to attics, basements, backrooms, and Lesbian and Dyke pleasure is fetishized by a heteronormative gaze.

Confessions of a Party Mom brings these private moments up out of the basement and contextualises them within a broader setting. Most importantly, beneath the parties sits an ecology of care that is often missed or ignored. An essential (sometimes dicult and messy) support structure from which parties, creativity and community can bloom.

Emma Bentley-Fox has created in Hyde Park Book Club, a personal reection on growth, shared queer experience of community and a new addition to the archive.