Utopia Supplement
Fag Tips for Human Rights Baby
The Unworld to Come. Imagining an Otherwise…
24.01.2026 – 04.04.2026Installation of digitally printed vinyl billboard banner, text set in Times New Bastard by Wei Huang; 21 brass-plated steel hooks, red vinyl wall adhesive, archival photograph reproduction of “Acetate Foil for Lamination” [featuring Frances Benedict], photo by Jackie Martin, International News Photos, 1946. Nationa Archives 64-NA-464
Installation views of The Unworld to Come. Imagining an Otherwise..., Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 2026. Photograph by Paul Salveson.
Fag Tips for Human Rights Baby draws from both links, Virgil B/ Taylor’s speculative zine format, Fag Tips Utopia Zine, and his essay ‘The Human Rights Baby’ (2020) about the persistent idea of an innocent Western humanism and its attachment to an infantile way of living in the here and now. Taylor writes: “The baby, like its witnesses, is looking out
for nothing in particular. / Like babies forgetting ourselves, stumbling towards the next thing to do, though we forget—you have to actively push that past aside.”
The installation Fag Tips for Human Rights Baby complicates thes ways to organize language, memory, and knowledge as they are privileged in western contexts. The graphic design of the vinyl banner undoes the grid that not only renders text and images, but also bodies or land into legible, translatable, and governable subjects. Using typography and the banner’s collapsing body as a means of fragmentation, Taylor’s work allows for new meaning to emanate in-between the folds. Instead of offering (moral) orientation and closure, it refuses to contain itself and glides back and forth on the affective slips present in Western hegemonial archives. In this work, the photograph by Jackie Martin, positioned behind the banner shows a stunt with lamination foil by Frances Benedict, a worker in the Division of Repair and Preservation at the National Archives in the 1940s: “In this shell no
one can touch me,” comments Taylor in the second issue of Fag Tips Utopia Zine, “Utopia Too” (2015).
– Annika Haas
for nothing in particular. / Like babies forgetting ourselves, stumbling towards the next thing to do, though we forget—you have to actively push that past aside.”
The installation Fag Tips for Human Rights Baby complicates thes ways to organize language, memory, and knowledge as they are privileged in western contexts. The graphic design of the vinyl banner undoes the grid that not only renders text and images, but also bodies or land into legible, translatable, and governable subjects. Using typography and the banner’s collapsing body as a means of fragmentation, Taylor’s work allows for new meaning to emanate in-between the folds. Instead of offering (moral) orientation and closure, it refuses to contain itself and glides back and forth on the affective slips present in Western hegemonial archives. In this work, the photograph by Jackie Martin, positioned behind the banner shows a stunt with lamination foil by Frances Benedict, a worker in the Division of Repair and Preservation at the National Archives in the 1940s: “In this shell no
one can touch me,” comments Taylor in the second issue of Fag Tips Utopia Zine, “Utopia Too” (2015).
– Annika Haas