Bio:
Res Tahan Julian is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Res graduated with a BA in Sociology and Studio Art from Smith College, an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a post-master’s in curatorial studies from CuratorLab at Konstfack University in Stockholm, Sweden. They are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and their work has been supported by
residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, receiving grants from the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and the Swedish Arts Grant Committee. Res was shortlisted for a Lucie Foundation Scholarship, received a Saatchi Art Rising Star Award and their book Towers of Thanks, published in 2017 by Loose Joints, was a finalist for the Lucie Photo Book Prize. Their work has been exhibited at BRIC in Brooklyn, Invisible-Exports in New York, Widener Gallery at Trinity College in Connecticut, Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles and Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco amongst other venues. Recent publications featuring their work include Aperture, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Girls Like Us, Cultured Magazine, Vice Magazine, W Magazine, The Paris Review and Matte Magazine. Res is faculty at the International Center for Photography, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College and has formerly held teaching positions at the University of Gothenburg, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Smith College and Image Text Ithaca.
Statement:
My practice is rooted in photography and engages with the fluidity of identity and intimacy in visceral detail. I often work within my intimate communities and with subjects close to my experience, maintaining a deep awareness of the responsibilities that come with photographing others and a need to use the language of the medium in a way that doesn’t feel limiting to me as an artist. Questioning traditional notions of legibility, my work makes space for multiple realities and truths to coexist, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private, personal and political. I frequently work in collaboration, adapting photographic strategies to suit each project’s parameters.
Thicker Than Water, a series made in collaboration with my father, uses artifice and staged photography to examine masculinity, the toll of assimilation, addiction, aging, loss, and the limits of the nuclear family through a compassionate, playful, and critical gaze.
Pulse documents the makeshift memorial that emerged around the police barricade surrounding Pulse nightclub in Orlando immediately following the mass shooting in which 49 people were killed. Deciding against making portraits of survivors or witnesses, I was moved to create still-lifes of the poetic articulations of public mourning—notes, signs, flowers, and flags left by visitors and community members on
and around the memorial fence, which delineated the boundary between both public and private and life and death.
Towers of Thanks, a non-linear allegory about my mother—who served as the construction manager of Trump Tower and is now an anti-Trump activist—combines staged narratives, archival materials, social media, and snapshots to expose how myths of masculine power perpetuate systemic oppression.
My current work focuses on performative and ritualistic acts as a way of exploring my relationship to both transness and photographic representation. The series aspires to authentically reflect my experience as a trans person, one that holds both a past and present, without relying on literal depictions or reducing trans identity photographically to the surface of the body.