The Genderhouse Festival 2026

Artistic director Andreas Constantinou of HIMHERANDIT Productions and The Genderhouse Festival about the shaping of this 2026 edition of the festival.

For the first time in the festival’s herstory, The Gender House Queer Arts Festival moves beyond sole curation by me. The 2025 edition emerges from a collective curatorial and advisory process, inviting new perspectives on contemporary drag and its future directions.

To broaden the festival’s international scope, an external team of artists and curators—Michael Caldwell, Fu Kuen Tang, Anders Duckworth, Ann-Christin Kongsness, and Olympia Bukkakis—was assembled to create dialogue between artistic practice and curatorial vision. This expanded structure was developed in collaboration with former producer Sigrid Aakvik, who also co-curated previous editions and played a key role in bringing the team together.

Over the course of a year, the group met online and through a shared research visit to Aarhus in 2025, engaging with the festival’s spaces, contexts, and ambitions. These encounters became a forum for discussing the urgencies of queer performance today and the evolving languages of drag as an expanded art form.

While the festival’s initial ambition for a large-scale international programme could not be realised due to funding limitations, the team chose adaptation over cancellation. The focus shifted toward intimacy and encounter, resulting in a programme of three works offering immediate and deeply felt expressions of contemporary drag.

This edition is shaped through dialogue, collaboration, and responsiveness—grounded in the belief that drag remains one of the most inventive, critical, and transformative performance practices of our time.