‘Ken. To be destroyed’ at Unity Theatre, Liverpool

This exhibition was part of Homotopia’s 10th anniversary arts festival. David Hockney, Boy George, John Waters, April Ashley and David Hoyle also featured in the festival. The exhibition was funded by Homotopia, Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council and Unity Theatre.

This was the first exhibition of the project ‘Ken. To be destroyed’. The exhibition included early exploratory works produced in response to material from Davidmann's family archive.

The project arises out of a family secret - that Davidmann’s uncle Ken (K) was trans*. The family attempted to erase this from history and the family photograph album depicts K as male.

In 2011 Davidmann found a collection of family letters and documents about K being trans* in envelopes labelled “to be destroyed”. At the same time, she came across a set of K and Hazel’s wedding ‘proofs’. Looking at the photographs and letters together it seemed to Davidmann that in one hand she was holding an emblem of what in the case of trans* people a conventional family album allowed – the erasure of the trans* life - and in the other evidence of the experiences that would have been erased.

Without Davidmann’s involvement the family would have expunged the fact that there was a trans* family member. Using letters, photographs and photographic processes Davidmann tells the story that is missing from K and Hazel’s wedding photographs. In this work she is holding a ‘conversation’ with the family album, queering it, and returning a new version of the story to the family history.

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