To See and Be Seen by Conor Collins
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Wed 8 Jul-Sat 31 OctFrom 10:00Granada Foundation Galleries
Discover Conor Collin's new exhibition
Conor Collins’ first solo exhibition is born from a deep exploration of the Queer Up North archive, responding to stories, people and moments found in the archive.
Some are loud.
Some whisper.
Almost all refuse to behave themselves.
At its heart is a simple but urgent idea: to see and to be seen.
Here, identity is not fixed or easily defined. It is something shaped daily: performed, protected, revealed, and sometimes concealed. Visibility runs through the work as both liberation and risk. To be seen can be powerful. It can also be dangerous. Within this tension, people still created, performed, loved, and refused to disappear.
The works in this exhibition explore that complexity through moments of courage, creativity, and resistance.
This body of work asks what it means to truly see another person. Not to glance or categorise, but to recognise their humanity in all its depth and contradiction.
It also reflects on the role of the archive itself, as a space that preserves not just events, but presence. A space that insists these lives mattered and continue to matter.
You are invited to spend time here and encounter the stories within it differently.
Not as distant history, but as lives that echo with something deeply familiar: the desire to be known, to be remembered, and to be seen.
Free to attend, drop by to our Granada Foundation Galleries on Level 1 and 2.
No booking required.
In the words of the artist
‘There are people who paint flowers, there are people who paint landscapes. I find myself painting that which refuses explanation. The things that do not sit still long enough to be named properly. The glance that arrives before certainty. The body that has to keep introducing itself to a world determined to mishear it.
The works in To See and Be Seen come out of Manchester’s Queer Up North archive. An archive full of evidence that queer life has never been quiet, even when it was being told to be.
It is all there: the performance, the protest, the glamour, the grief, the joy that refuses to behave. Threaded through it all is the knowledge that visibility is never neutral. It is both spotlight and exposure. Both invitation and risk. One learns quickly that to be seen is not the same as to be understood. That misunderstanding can be organised, funded, and become law.
So what does it actually mean to see another person?
Not to scan them. Not to categorise them. Not to consume them as information. But to recognise them properly, inconveniently, irreversibly.
There are portraits that resist being finished. There are eyes that refuse to stop looking back. There are bodies that do not apologise for continuing to exist in public, and there is always, somewhere underneath it all, the archive itself. Holding what it can, losing what it must, insisting nonetheless that these lives were not incidental. They were central. They still are. Because archives do not only store the past. They argue with forgetting, and sometimes, if you stand in front of them long enough, they begin to argue with you.
If you have ever felt too much, not enough, out of place, unplaceable, or briefly certain that you might be a mistake in someone else’s system then you are already part of this conversation.
It’s nice to SEE you.’
- Conor Collins
Visit the Granada Foundation Galleries and discover To See and Be Seen, an exhibition exploring queer identity, memory and the enduring power of visibility.
Credits
Conor Collins (he/him)
Manchester Histories and Queer Up North
Archives+
Manchester City Council
HOME
National Lottery Heritage
The Granada Foundation