A familiar prop returns: the vacuum cleaner. The plastic body is dressed in lace and its transparent bag glows with glitter and LEDs, as if it had just finished cleaning up after-hours. The glitter’s colours match those of the trans flag, and the ‘t’ in the Roll-o-Ma(t)ic logo – the self-described experts in ‘roll-bag solutions’ – has been blackened out. What, exactly, has been cleaned up here? The piece may be familiar for its echo of Freddie Mercury’s drag vacuuming in Queen’s I Want to Break Free, 1984, where the chores of suburbia become subversive performance. It may also be a recognisable sight if you have encountered Vincent Grange’s House of Dorothy universe before: his evolving queer world-building project, its title riffing on the coded signifier ‘a friend of Dorothy’ that gay men have used since the 1950s. The vacuum cleaner reads less as an appliance than as a recurring character: a piece of scenography that reappears as the narrative shifts location.
In this exhibition Dorothy’s stand-in is no longer a solo act: the vacuum cleaner is reframed within a triptych. Together with a dustpan-and-brush rendered useless by a stiletto heel and topped with a 3D-printed anal plug as handle and a wheelie shopping bag stuffed with ribbons, lace, and bottles, it becomes an ensemble. The trio is cast as a girl band, The Madwomen of Chaillot, whom the artist imagines as having been present when the Stonewall Riots erupted in 1969. The exhibition takes its cues from Jerry Lisker’s New York Daily News report from 6 July 1969, whose headline and tone reflect the era’s mainstream hostility and homophobic sensationalism as he sneered at the scene: ‘bobby pins, compacts, curlers, lipstick tubes, and other femme fatale missiles were flying in the direction of the cops’. (1) Grange lifts those disparaging details, flips their charge, and reminds the contemporary onlooker in Zürich that the ‘glitter of the broken glass from ’69 is still sparkling’.
Grange makes sharp use of the gallery’s small, column-broken room, carving it into three distinct but related geographies: Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York, Castro Street in San Francisco, and the Tuileries in Paris. After building Dorothy’s House from the inside, this body of work steps outside and into the present, where historical memory meets contemporary politics and pop fiction collides with lived reality. Its political charge is signalled in the work titles themselves, each missing the letter ‘t': a typographic blackout that points to Trump-era anti-trans rhetoric, made plain in efforts to erase the ‘T’ from ‘LGBTQ+’ on all US government websites. The joke tightens, the stakes sharpen: camp humour gives way to archival urgency.
Erasure, here, is not only linguistic. _uileries’ Disco S_umps, 2025, takes the form of an earthy square: small silver tree stumps catch the glare of spotlights, while a towering Coppelia ice-cream sign rises in the centre like a kitsch beacon. On the opposing wall, Mourning Hose, 2025, hangs like a figure in a black funerary wear. Both refer to the Tuileries gardens in front of the Louvre, long known as a gay cruising site. That history is hardly obscure: it is documented across multiple online cruising guides and traced in scholarship back to the early 18th century. (2) Yet in the lead-up to the 2024 Olympics, the gardens were ‘reconfigured’ in ways that engineered cruising out of the landscape: hedges shortened, trees cut, lawns opened up, stripping the intimate encounters of the opacity they relied on. This is a familiar ‘cleaning up’ of public spaces, less a renovation than the sanitising of queer heritage. The exhibition stages this loss materially.
The show’s politics surface most sharply at the level of making. What initially reads as found or casually assembled – the towering Coppelia sign or the hose – turns out to be built and staged through deliberate, skilled labour, a testament to Grange’s versatile engagement with materials and his assured handling of them. His working method is similarly collective: through the artist-run structures he has co-founded, knowledge and technique circulate between projects, so that objects regularly emerge from collaboration rather than a solitary hand. That, too, was the case for the three stainless steel plaques that index the exhibition’s geographic locations. Made with Tanguy Troubat, the plaques were produced by electro-etching: the forms were drawn digitally, vinyl-cut, and applied to the steel before the plates were submerged in salt water and hooked up to an electric current. Over hours, the exposed steel was eaten away. The method matters: practices of care and collaboration sit alongside the deliberately violent procedure – controlled harm – that echoes the coercion and repression that repeatedly shaped queer life.
The exhibition’s strength is its specificity: the artist keeps history close to the surface, so that it cannot be softened into mood. This becomes most explicit in Il Gioco dell’Oca di Doro_hy, 2025, a boardgame map that knots the exhibitions geographies and serves as an interpretive key to the show. Hung on the wall as a glossy aluminium Dibond panel, the numbered spiral is based on the Milanese Goose Game first released in the Italian magazine Babilonia in 1982. In Grange’s iteration, Coppelia surfaces on square five – ‘two strawberry scoops for a good time!’ – hinting at a lexicon of cruising. A few squares later, on square sixteen, the tone snaps into the present with a blunt instruction: ‘The Olympic flame burns your bush, go back 150 years to square 1’. In this manner, the board pulls the exhibition’s scattered histories and pop-cultural references into a single route, with each landing point becoming a link in a chain of queer memory. Like Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s game-like environments exploring Black trans experiences (3), it treats interactivity as a form of living archive – but where her works make the viewer’s choice shape the encounter, Grange’s goose game keeps you on a fixed track, as if the route itself were the argument.
In his first solo show at Fabian Lang, Grange makes explicit and thoughtful use of space and placement. He convincingly shows that his work can be both inviting and exacting – rooted in history, politics, play, and pop, yet keyed to the darker pressures of politics. With a House of Dorothy catalogue due this summer, it’s hard not to want to follow where this universe goes next.
References:
(1) Jerry Lisker, ‘Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad’, New York Daily News, 6 July 1969
(2) Jeffrey Merrick, ‘The Paris Cruising Scene in 1750’, The Gay & Lesbian Review, July-August, 2019
(3) Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, ‘Playable Games’, https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/playable-games [accessed: 21 January 2026]
Vincent Grange, The Madwomen of Chaillot, Fabian Lang, Obere Zäune 12, 27 November 2025–31 January 2026