White Knuckle Forever

the debut international solo-exhibition by Reuben Brown at “The Backshop” at Culterim Gallery, Gesundbrunnen, Brunnenstraße 107, 13355 Berlin; Germany. 06-09 March 2025 White Knuckle Forever is a love letter to the fleeting - a pulse held in tension, an echo in the dark. It traces the whispered intimacies that shape queer lives, unravelling the quiet gestures of queer masculine romance: breaths held, bodies tighten, white knuckled fists clench. Set within queer club-spaces of the past, White Knuckle Forever dances through the fragile histories of queer nightlife that press against the present. Through experimental film, sculpture, works on paper, jewellery, participation and performance, and a research pamphlet/artist book developed alongside the exhibition, White Knuckle Forever becomes a precarious archive of both devotion and disappearance. White Knuckle Forever presents a new body of work by Reuben Brown that unfolds through processes of fragmentation and reassembly, tracing the fragile and ephemeral histories of queer nightlife. Materials shift, distort and are pulled apart, footage is broken and restitched, images unravel into gestures and sounds, delicate surfaces hover on the edge of disappearance. These acts of rupture and reconstruction echo the ways queer histories persist; scattered, splintered and partial. Each work in the exhibition enacts a cycle of dispersion and retrieval, where memory is both unstable and enduring.