Orlan Ohtonen, Venla Helenius, 2025; Del LaGrace Volcano, image courtesy of the artist.

Join us on 17 October at 2pm for curator Orlan Ohtonen and artist Del LaGrace Volcano in conversation. Ohtonen and Volcano will discuss Volcano’s current exhibition, Sensual / Mutual, which surfaces unseen photographs from the artist’s time in 1970s and 80s San Francisco and Santa Fe among  leather dykes, gender-variant people and land-based communities. The talk will consider Volcano’s five-decade practice of embedded, collaborative image-making, its role in shaping queer, trans and feminist visual culture, and what these histories of self-fashioning and collective life might offer to the present.

This event is generously supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Orlan Ohtonen is a curator and writer based in Helsinki, Finland, currently holding the position of Curator of Exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography. Ohtonen has been building self-organised platforms for intersectional curatorial practices as part of the collective ‘nynnyt’; as Co-Founder of feminist and anti-racist workspace Poimu; as Co-Founder and Co-Director of Feminist Culture House; and as Co-Founder and Co-Organiser of trans cultural sauna event series Sweat and Tears. His curatorial practice and research are focused on investigating how trans and queer temporality, abolitionist politics, and activist curatorial praxis can generate transformative models of institutional change within contemporary museums. Ohtonen has written about the relationship between curatorial activism and cultural politics for several art publications, and is the Lead Editor of Curating & Repair, published in 2026 by 1000Words.

Del LaGrace Volcano (b. 1957) is an American artist, performer, and activist, currently based in Sweden. A formally trained photographer, Volcano’s work includes installation, performance and film and interrogates the performance of gender on several levels, especially the performance of masculinity and femininity. S/he attended the San Francisco Art Institute and received an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby in 1992.