12 Souls, 12 Resurrections

12 Souls, 12 Resurrections is part of Tate's ongoing "Resurrections" series; glass reliquaries that reunite historical queer lives with visibility, tenderness, and time. Each work begins with an archival photograph, often from the mid-19th through mid-20th century: images made in eras when queer intimacy and self-definition were routinely censored, criminalized, or forced into secrecy. Tate digitally animates these portraits: subtle movements of breath, gaze, and touch, granting the sitters a present tense that history often denied them.

Encased within a blown-glass dome, the moving image becomes a kind of secular shrine. By titling the series "Resurrections," Tate reframes animation as reparative work. The goal is not to invent a false past, but to offer what was withheld: visibility without punishment, intimacy without fear, and a future that recognizes queer lineage as part of the human record. Each "resurrection" becomes a quiet insistence that these lives mattered then and matter now.