‘Ballroom Angels’

Art-Icon: Static Cinema

Venice Film Festival 2025

Ballroom Angels is an intimate portrait of two British-Ugandan ballroom artists, Webster and Sweetny, active within London’s queer ballroom scene. The work centres on the bond between the two subjects, exploring intimacy, trust, and the idea of chosen family as a vital structure of support.

The photograph was exhibited as part of Art-Icon: Static Cinema, presented between 29 August and 24 September 2025 during the Venice Film Festival 2025. Within this exhibition context, Ballroom Angels sits in dialogue with broader conversations around contemporary portraiture, visibility, and representation.

Introduced to London’s ballroom culture through Webster and Sweetny, Lang documents a community that functions as a queer safe space for people of colour: one that celebrates self-expression, talent, and identity through performance and competition.

Collaborating with the talents over the course of three years, the image depicts the duo’s evolving modes of self-expression, tracing how they navigate and challenge cultural expectations around gender and sexuality.

For this particular session, the portrait was created within the subjects’ East London apartment. Removed from the performative intensity of the ballroom floor, the image reveals a quieter register: one that exposes vulnerability, devotion, and the emotional intimacy between two individuals allowing each other to exist fully and authentically.

Rooted in Lang’s ongoing interest in the beauty of everyday, unguarded moments, Ballroom Angels reflects his commitment to telling stories that are often overlooked or rendered invisible. Through this project, London is presented as a space of multiplicity and exchange, where identity is lived, negotiated, and affirmed through connection.