Art for inclusion

 

Headlining the 19th Paris International Tournament at City Hall. For just one day, the art exhibition!​

From May 22 to 24, 2026, the 19th edition of the Paris International Tournament transforms Paris into a living arena of solidarity, competition, and visibility. Founded by the LGBT+ Sports Federation, the tournament brings together thousands of athletes from around the world to defend a simple but radical idea: every body deserves space, dignity, and freedom in public life and sports.

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​At the symbolic heart of this year's edition – inside the historic halls of the Paris City Hall – the international collective ¡Qué Escándalo! presents a main exhibition exploring the body both as a battlefield and a territory of liberation.

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Organized by Nikita Egorov-Kirillov and Torro Osten, the exhibition connects queer identity, migration, and contemporary sport through works created by artists from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. What emerges is not a single narrative, but a polyphony of survival stories shaped by exile, transformation, vulnerability, and endurance. Sport has long been associated with discipline, masculinity, hierarchy, and national identity. Yet, for queer and migrant communities, the athletic body has often existed under scrutiny—judged, excluded, fetishized, or politicized. In this context, the exhibition asks the question: what does it mean for marginalized bodies not only to survive visibility but to occupy space in a competitive, collective, and proud way? For many participating artists, the body is not an abstraction. He carries boundaries, memories, work, transitions, wounds, pleasure, and fear.​

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Like athletes entering a tournament, queer migrants are constantly negotiating with systems of control: language barriers, bureaucracy, economic precarity, social hostility, and the psychological pressure of reinvention. The exhibition presents these experiences not as peripheral stories, but as acts of endurance and resistance. Founded in Madrid by refugee and migrant LGBTQ+ artists, ¡Qué Escándalo! began as a small self-organized exhibition among displaced creatives seeking to rebuild their lives through art. What united them was not nationality or style, but the urgent need to remain visible within societies that often demand assimilation or silence. Two years later, the collective transformed into a growing international platform with exhibitions across Spain and Europe, bringing together emerging and established voices through radically different artistic languages

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The exhibition reflects this multiplicity: Italian abstractionism exists alongside Russian art brut, contemporary Chinese botanical painting alongside Iranian pop art, Venezuelan photojournalism alongside French ultra-realism and Spanish portrait photography. The diversity of aesthetics mirrors the very diversity of queer existence. There is no single queer image, no single migrant narrative, no single political voice. Instead, ¡Qué Escándalo! embraces contradiction, emotional intensity, fragmentation, celebration, and noise—taking up what dominant culture often rejects as 'too much,' 'too emotional,' or indeed, 'escándalo.'

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Presented as part of one of Europe's largest inclusive sporting events, the exhibition also recontextualizes the competition itself. Beyond medals and rankings, sport becomes a metaphor for persistence: the trained body, the exhausted body, the disciplined body, the body refusing to disappear. Every athlete arriving at the TIP carries a personal story of overcoming shame, exclusion, or invisibility. The same goes for the artists gathered in this exhibition. At a time when the rights of queer people, the lives of migrants, and bodily autonomy are increasingly contested around the world, Art for Inclusion offers another vision of community - a vision based not on similarity, but on coexistence. Here, art and sport meet not through spectacle, but through a shared politics of presence.

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​To compete is to declare: I am here. To exhibit is to declare the same thing.

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¡Qué Escándalo !

From 3.00 p.m.