WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery presents works by Strauss Louw (South Africa), João Gabriel (Portugal), and Pierre Fouché (South Africa) — three queer artists whose practices navigate the currents of intimacy, memory, and desire. Anchored by the curatorial metaphor of water, this presentation invites viewers to consider the fluid, porous, and mutable qualities of identity and eroticism as shaped by both personal and collective histories.

Water, as both material and metaphor, underpins Strauss Louw’s exploration of the male form and the aesthetics of longing. In his photographic practice, Louw often engages historical techniques that accentuate the physicality and temporality of image-making. His salt prints—developed with seawater, sunlight, and silver on silk—embody the elemental forces of erosion, staining, and exposure. These processes echo the fugitive nature of queer desire, which historically has resisted legibility and permanence. Louw’s use of oceanic elements serves as both literal and symbolic medium, offering a quietly devotional encounter with sensuality and its ephemerality.

João Gabriel’s lush, large-scale paintings are similarly haunted by the fluid interplay between presence and absence. Drawing from 1970s gay erotic cinema, Gabriel restages scenes of intimacy and tenderness that hover between nostalgia and reinvention. Water appears as backdrop and as affective register: beachscapes and maritime light frame his subjects in states of reverie or touch, conjuring a horizon of longing shaped by histories of loss. Gabriel’s practice engages in an act of reclamation—of joy, sensuality, and vulnerability—foregrounding queer bodies not as sites of trauma alone, but as vessels of survival, pleasure, and relationality.

Pierre Fouché’s ’n Versameling Ontelbare Oomblikke II (Aggregate of Countless Moments II) is a handwoven lace work based on a photograph by Timmi Taubenschreck. Using a traditionally gendered craft, Fouché transforms an ephemeral moment into a monumental textile gesture—threaded with erotic tension and rhythmic flow. The undulating rhythms of the textile evoke the tides, suggesting love and desire as cyclical, immersive forces that both conceal and reveal.

Taken together, these artists activate water not only as symbol, but as a methodology—a way of approaching the queer body as always shifting, interstitial, and deeply entangled with the natural world. The presentation is not simply thematic; it proposes water as a queer archive: fluid, expansive, and capable of holding contradiction. It gestures toward a politics of tenderness and the poetics of becoming, where queerness is not anchored in fixed identities but flows across time, space, and medium.

Selected works on display at Booth A214.

For artwork inquiries, please contact Kimberley Cunningham at kimberley@whatiftheworld.com.