Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo is an art historian and independent curator whose research and exhibitions often begin from acts of critical revisitation – whether of defining cultural texts or exhibition histories – and open onto new social possibilities. Across photography, time-based media and performance histories, they think about how images and ephemera circulate, function referentially and accrue power within intergenerational queer, trans and feminist contexts and anti-colonial movements of self-determination.
Gabe is currently serving as a curatorial advisor (with Rasha Salti, Marie Helene Pereira, Rory Tsapayi and Siddhartha Mitter) for Koyo Kouoh's 61st Biennale Arte: In Minor Keys, Venice. The exhibition is open through November 2026.
Curatorial
As a curator, Gabe has significant experience working with contemporary artists in collaborative projects of scale and breadth. For the Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022) they worked as part of the curatorial team to deliver the city-wide edition. This included the group exhibition Photography Beyond Capture at Deichtorhallen Hamburg–Halle für aktuelle Kunst, where they worked with artists including Carrie Yamaoka, Marilyn Nance, Elle Pérez, Clifford Prince King, Lebohang Kganye, Vartan Avakian and RaMell Ross.
For the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2018–19), they worked as part of a curatorial research unit on Dig Where You Stand, an exhibition conceived in response to the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History. Bringing together objects and artworks held within these museums into considered conversations, DWYS sought a necessary intervention into the institutional systems of display, accession and taxonomy enshrined in the Carnegie museums.
Their writing has appeared in Camera Austria, Sculpture Journal, Another Gaze, LUX and Art21, and artist books published by Modern Art Oxford (Frieda Toranzo Jaeger) and Copenhagen Contemporary (Claudia Comte). Through 2021–22 they were commissioning editor for Allegories of the Visible, a digital journal for writing on photography and visual culture, and co-editor of Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image (Hatje Cantz, 2022). Gabe has organised symposia and workshops for Paul Mellon Centre; Country SALTS, Bennwil; the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia and 1:54 FORUM (London and New York City, 2013–17), among others.
Research
Gabe’s current project explores how trans social history is reconstituted through artistic practice. In development as an exhibition and book, it considers how the remixing and reuse of existing material has spurred formally innovative and politically vital imaginaries, complicating their derivation while building a haptic grammar for trans life and being within and beyond the UK.
Gabe received their PhD in art history from UCL in 2022. Their doctoral research explored the intersection of feminist, queer and ecological cultural politics and artistic strategies from the acceleration of the environmental movement in the 1970s through to the early 2000s. Gabe has taught courses on performance art, artists and transnational archives, and the politics of the body at the Slade, University of York and UCL.
Their teaching and research draws from a range of critical traditions including queer and trans studies, performance studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, Indigenous studies and Black feminist visual theory. Their research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Terra Foundation for American Art, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust (2026–29).