Portraits from the Threshold [2015-2026]
Gil Mualem-Doron
Developed over ten years with more than 40 men and trans men, *No Man’s Lands: Portraits from the Threshold* is a socially engaged photography project created with migrants, refugees and LGBTQIA+ people experiencing personal, social, economic or political limbo. Through sustained conversation, participants shape their settings, clothing, gestures and narratives, challenging the photographer’s conventional authority.
Intersectionality is central: sexuality, gender, ethnicity, class, migration status, disability and mental health overlap, producing distinct forms of exclusion and contested belonging. Performance reveals what portraiture may conceal. In Cape Town, Mihlali and Lelethu—close friends—stage the intimacy of a fictional gay couple; Chiyo reads from his life as a trans person of colour; a Brazilian actor posing as a rent boy performs his fear of poverty; Yamkela negotiates what it means to “act gay”; and Finn, a leather trans man, disrupts the visual language of Tom of Finland.
The project reflects Photo Fringe’s theme, *Feedback Loop*, through the exchange between photographer and participant: conversation shapes the image, which is reviewed, performed and reinterpreted. Drawing on Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, it treats identity and photographic meaning as relational rather than fixed. In the gallery, the loop expands to include viewers, whose responses return the portraits to debates about visibility, power and belonging. Shown in the UK, Israel–Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Germany and Brazil, each context generates another reading—and another turn of the loop.
Artist
Gil Mualem-Doron
Dr Gil Mualem-Doron is an award-winning artist, photographer, curator and educator of Iraqi-Jewish and Bulgarian heritage. His socially engaged practice grows from his lived experience as a queer Arab-Jewish migrant, his family’s histories of persecution and displacement, and his work with marginalised communities. Informed by his PhD research into contested spaces, it manifests in collaborative photography: participants help shape how, where and why they are represented. His work has been exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Brazil.
