The Cabinet of Queeriosities (2014) is a new body of work by Philippine-born, Toronto-based visual artist
Julius Poncelet Manapul. An Affiliate Event of WorldPride 2014 Toronto, this artistic intervention spans
three spaces of first floor of Studio 386 (386 Ontario Street, just south-east of the Church Wellesley Village)
and consists of installation, sculpture, video projection, digital art, and mixed media works which interrogate
the artist’s experiences of racialized queerness in the age of globalization and diaspora. Using visual
vocabularies culled from colonial and Indigenous cultures in the Philippines, abstracted gay pornography,
and found everyday objects, Manapul constructs stunning hybrid creations that belie first impressions and
challenge homonormative and heteronomative gazes.

Curated by artist and scholar Marissa Largo, this intervention includes an artist/curator talk that will
provide opportunities to consider the experiences of queers of colour and artistic production in the midst of
mainstream representations proliferated by the Internet and popular culture. The guided tour offers an
up-close and behind-the-scenes look at Manapul’s exquisite, highly crafted works of art.

In light of WorldPride, Manapul mobilizes compelling and subversive visual strategies to assert that
queerness is not a universal experience, but is mediated by race, class, culture, and other subjectivities.
These are sometimes unaccounted for by globalized discourses of queerness, which purport solidarity and
pride at the expense of difference. Manapul’s artistic intervention in WorldPride is an assertion of his
experiences from the margins of the margin in the global city.