Lahden valokuvataide ry:n kutsunäyttely

SHIA ROWAN CONLON
If your history was an ache
19.11.–7.12.2025

Galleria Uusi Kipinä, Kulma

If your history was an ache is a solo show by Shia Rowan Conlon. The works in the show are a series of handmade ceramic frames with photographic collages, drawn from LGBTQI+ archives as well as the artist’s own image practice. If your history was an ache speaks to a personal reckoning with trans history, confronting how much has been lost due to personal collections being destroyed after death and wider societal negligence and omission.



These gaps in history cannot be changed, so what do we do in the meantime? Conlon’s work tries to create webs in the voids, weaving threads from the bodily knowledge of trans ancestors to the present. In the show, desire is deployed as a methodology: a drive to see, to touch, to know, a force which persists even as memory and matter break down. 



The movement from historical absence to material embodiment is central to Conlon’s practice, where the archive is not merely remembered but physically reconstructed. In If your history was an ache the use of fragile, organic, and photographic matter turns the body into sediment, a site where life, death, sex and loss, converge.