SLQS Gallery
Exhibition: I Know Who I Am by Being With You on view from 25th April - 17th May 2025
SLQS Gallery presents I Know Who I Am By Being With You, the first solo exhibition by trans non-binary photographer and AWITA member Bex Wade. The show captures New York’s queer nightlife in the early 2010s through Wade’s early works.
Starting out in the underground club scenes in the UK and New York, Wade documented queer nightlife as a radical space of expression. Later, they turned their lens to the streets, capturing global Pride movements and acts of protest. With a background in performance, Wade sees image-making as a dialogue between bodies and space—whether on the dancefloor or in protest.
Arriving in New York in 2010, Wade sought out spaces where queerness and community could be explored without constraint. Their camera became part of that search, documenting warehouse Pride parties in Brooklyn, Van Dam at Greenhouse, and the spectacles of Susanne Bartsch and Amanda Lepore. These photos pulse with the unfiltered exuberance of a time that can’t be replicated.
This body of work is a love letter to queer nights, a meditation on performance as survival. Nightclubs become stages where identity is constructed, reimagined and celebrated. Wade’s lens captures fleeting rituals of becoming—moments of self-expression and shared belonging.
Unlike detached documentarians, Wade was immersed—dancing alongside their subjects. “The drag queens, club kids, gender rebels,” Wade says, “embody a freedom that existed before fluidity became marketable.”
Wade’s work preserves ephemeral queer experiences and asks: How do we honour the ways we’ve lived and survived?
Wade is a UK-based artist whose work documents queer lives with a focus on joy, resistance and self-determination. They are the first trans artist to be displayed permanently by the V&A Museum, with work featured in Vogue, VICE, The New York Times, and others.
Recent exhibitions include Photographing Protest (London, 2022) and Grown Up in Britain (Coventry, 2023).
Bex Wade, Public Assembly Pride (2012), Archival Pigment Print
The exhibition was created with the support of art consultant Anna Smithson. SLQS Gallery is a contemporary art gallery committed to platforming women and queer artists across generations. Founded by AWITA Member Sarah Le Quang Sang, SLQS emerges at a pivotal moment when the need for unapologetic spaces for women and queer voices has never been more urgent.