Bossing Images
The power of images, queer art and politics
Neuerscheinung
Bossing Images.
The Power of Images, Queer Art, and PoliticsNeue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin 2012
edited by Jess Dorrance and Antke Engel
ISBN 978-3-938515-45-7, 112 S., 19,- Eur
Please order at: NGBKBossing Images is about the bossy relationships between images and their audiences. Drawing on queer and postcolonial theory, it proposes bossiness as a framework through which to foreground the desiring, but not always, hierarchical, but never fully stabilized, power relations that shape the production, reception, and circulation of art. The concept also creates a setting where “the image” can function simultaneously as artwork, fantasy, and metaphor. Focusing on images by contemporary artists—a street protest-cum-love letter (Sharon Hayes), vacuuming “beds” in an underground lair (Helen Chadwick), a pole-dancing panda (Elodie Pong), bodies as abstract art (Jakob Lena Knebl, Hans Scheirl), and humanoid figures in potentially violent scenarios (Laylah Ali)—Bossing Images seeks to shift the question from “What is queer art?” to “What can queer art do?”
With texts by Bini Adamczak, Nana Adusei-Poku, Kerstin Brandes, Jess Dorrance, Antke Engel, Coco Fusco, Katalin Halasz, Katrin Köppert, Renate Lorenz, Sandra Ortmann, Tim Stüttgen a.k.a. timi mei monigatti, Füsun Türetken, Simon Vincent and Eva von Redecker.
Don't miss the > Blog of Bossing Images!
Series of Events, January - June 2012, NGBK Berlin
The relationship between images and their audiences is often a little bit bossy. Subjects boss images around to serve their ideological goals. Images boss subjects around, for instance by suggesting they conform to heteronormative ideals. Through mutual desire, images and subjects engage in illicit transgressions of their hierarchized relationships.
Focusing specifically on images that engage with ambiguous genders, queer desires, freaky bodies, and the puncturing of other intersecting normative imaginaries, this series of four public events will examine the social field of images, artists, audiences, critics, and curators. At each event, people and images will be invited to take on these roles (of “the artist” or “the audience”)—as well as to challenge them—in an attempt to explore how this field is structured by bossiness. This bossiness is hierarchical, saturated by power and desire, and always includes moments of failure. As with any “work relationship,” bosses can never fully control their employees—there are always paths for subversion and wasting company time.
Through experimenting with how these various agents work together, we are interested in challenging the role that curation plays in bossing images. We wish to develop curatorial formats that could trigger more nuanced considerations of bossiness in visual discourses and the structures that surround them.
Bossing Images is a project of the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst NGBK (http://ngbk.de), organized by Antke Engel and Jess Dorrance (Institute for Queer Theory) in cooperation with Renate Lorenz.
Infos
Further information will be available two weeks before each event at this website.
Time: 7 pm Salon: The artwork meets the audience.
8 pm Event: The invited guests begin their performance.Place: Neue Neuen Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst NGBK (http://ngbk.de)
Event Room (1st floor)
Oranienstraße 25, 10999 Berlin (U-Kottbusser Tor)
Language: mostly in German, participation in English is welcome, whispering translation is available. The June event will be in English.
Publication: forthcoming autumn 2012 - ISBN 978-3-938515-45-7
Blog: > http://bossingimages.tumblr.com
Monday January 23rd, 2012
MASKED PUBLICS / MASKIERTE ÖFFENTLICHKEITEN
What kind of masks do we wear to claim power in public spaces? What kind of images “belong” in public? What kind of speech gets heard?
Invited performers: Sharon Hayes Installation I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free (2007/08),
Danica Dakic´ (Düsseldorf) and Clarissa Thieme (Berlin).
Sharon Hayes: I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, 2007/08, performance foto, Courtesy: Sharon Hayes.
“My dear lover,” begins Sharon Hayes’ audio installation I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free (2007/08), “I am taking to the streets to speak to you because there seems to be no other way to get through.” Through her tinny megaphone, against the ambient sounds of traffic, Hayes’s work confronts us with a highly unusual form of protest. Is this an anti-war demonstration masked as lovesickness? Is the agony of abandonment being voiced in the guise of political activism? Is grief here—be it about war, love, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the political disillusionment of sweethearts, or all of these at once—able to claim space in the public realm?
Guests Clarissa Thieme and Danica Dakić will each bring one of their own works to the evening in order to provoke debate between I March, the audience, and each other. Struggling with the aftermath of the Bosnian War, the video First Shot (Dakić 2007/08) and short film Was bleibt (Thieme 2010) both explore how artistic practices can produce, rework, and unsettle various publics. They ask, among other questions: Who should and who can hear? What kind of speech van become visible? What kind of images are awarded power? How does masking, as a political strategy, fit into this?
The salon is open from 7 pm–8 pm in order for guests to get to know the three works and begin discussing them. The group discussion will take place between 8 pm–10 pm. Here, Thieme and Dakic´ will engage with the artworks and the public about themes of bossiness in and around the artworks as well as the question of what “masked publics” could mean politically and aesthetically.
The main discussion will take place in German but the audience is more than welcome to participate in English (or other languages when possible). Hayes’ work is in English and Thieme and Dakić’s works are accessible to all languages.
Monday March 26th, 2012
CONTAGIOUS COLLABORATION / KONTAMINIERENDE KOLLABORATION
Are power struggles inevitable in every collaboration? Do these struggles infect the images that are being worked with? Do images provoke collaboration? Can collaboration itself be considered contagious?
Invited performers: Helen Chadwicks S-8 Dokumentation einer Performance Domestic Sanitation (1976), Renate Lorenz (Berlin) und Sandra Ortmann (Berlin).
In Helen Chadwick’s 1976 collective performance piece Domestic Sanitation, grainily documented on Super 8 film, women do . . . things. In the first section, Latex Glamour Rodeo, latex-clad divas wander about their underground lair, rehearsing a series of cryptic rituals such as brushing each other’s pubic hair. In the second section, Bargain Bed Bonanza, four beds take the stage, smoking, dancing, vacuuming, and generally acting out.
During the event, guests Renate Lorenz and Sandra Ortmann will draw on tools of collaboration, contagion, queer feminism, and especially BDSM to establish a framework through which to discuss with and about Domestic Sanitation. What roles do the performers—including the guests themselves—occupy during their performances and to what ends? What rules are created and broken during artistic, sexual, and economic collaborations? What are the limits of artworks and our relationship to them, and what happens when these are overrun?
There will be two screenings of Domestic Sanitation before the event starts at 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. sharp. The live performance/discussion will start promptly at 8:00 p.m.
The event will take place in German and English. Spontaneous translation will be provided (from German to English and English to German, as well as other languages if possible). People are invited to contribute in whichever language they feel most comfortable in.
Helen Chadwick: Domestic Sanitation, 1976, still of a S-8 documentation of a performance, Courtesy: LUX (org.uk).
Helen Chadwick (1953–1996, UK) is a multimedia artist whose wry, often provocative work explores gender and sexuality, the body, and the self. Diving into the fervent feminist debates about the representation of “women’s bodies” in the 1970s and 80s, Chadwick’s early work often used her own body to challenge discourses about female roles, ideals, and lives. Later on in her career, her strategies shifted to drawing on more abstract vocabularies to discuss the body, including using human and animal body parts and innards. In her 1991–92 work Piss Flowers, for instance Chadwick made a series of casts of flower-shaped forms she created by peeing with her partner into snow. Chadwick was one of the first women to be shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1987. She died suddenly in 1996 from a rare virus.
Sandra Ortmann is a queer feminist activist, art educator, psychologist, and burlesque performer. From 2008 to the end of 2011, she led the art education program at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. Prior to this, she gave tours at the 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art and at documenta 12. Currently she is working on the maybe education of dOCUMENTA (13). The focus of her artistic work is on engaging with performative, conceptual, and (left)radical strategies, preferably with her boyband the Sissy Boyz. She has booked shows for Lynn Breedlove, was a singer in the punk band “too rude to be cute,” acted in Katrina Daschner’s film Aria de Mustang, and creates workshops on BDSM and queer themes, as well as on (performative) art education in museums. She has published the video documentation step up and be vocal – Interviews zu Queer Punk und Feminismus in San Francisco with Uta Busch (2001), the zine you rock my world (2003), as well as various essays on critical and performative art education since 2007.
Renate Lorenz works as an artist and a freelance writer particularly in the fields of queer theory and art theory. Her artistic work with Pauline Boudry engages with archives of historical (portrait) photography and film. Here, they focus on the history of sexual and gender discourses and practices, as well as on the meaning and relevance of “visibility” (www.boudry-lorenz.de). Their most recent work includes No Future/No Past (Venice Bienniale 2011, The Power Plant, Toronto) and Toxic (Paris Trienniale 2012). Lorenz’s latest publications are Temporal Drag (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011, with Boudry) and Queer Art (Transcript, Bielefeld, 2012). She is a professor of art and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Friday May 4th, 2012
ECSTATIC BODIES / EKSTATISCHE KÖRPER
Invited performers: Elodie Pong’s video Je Suis Une Bombe (2006), Jakob Lena Knebl (Wien), and Tim Stüttgen (Berlin).
The third installment of the event series Bossing Images, Ecstatic Bodies / Ekstatische Körper, explores the relationship between bodies extended in ecstasy and bodies that are contained, bordered, and concentrated. It presents and desires metamorphosing bodies that exceed their limits, as well as installed bodies that inspire what invited guest Jakob Lena Knebel calls “objectophilia.” Are these bodies images? And if so, what kind of bossing do they enact and submit to? What happens when a body, as in Elodie Pong’s invited video Je suis une bombe (2006), claims to be explosive? Can this intensity undermine a body’s status as “object”—or even blow it up? What happens when, as guest Tim Stüttgen suggests, webs of language made of signs and figures interweave with or overwrite queer power/body and power/knowledge? Video artist, painter, and performer Hans Scheirl will also be present as a special guest!
Elodie Pong’s video Je suis une bombe (2006, 6:12 mins) will be screened on a loop from 7 – 8 pm during the salon. It is in French with English subtitles. The live performance/discussion will start promptly at 8 pm and will take place in German. We will do our best to provide translation into English. Guests are invited to contribute in either German or English—whichever language they feel most comfortable in.
Elodie Pong: Je Suis Une Bombe, 2006, video still, Courtesy: Elodie Pong.
Jakob Lena Knebl is a performer and visual artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria. With humor and an often very personal approach, much of their work takes pleasure in embodiments that subvert the standards and expectations of social norms and morals. Identities and social encounters, Knebl argues in their work, cannot be experienced separate from the sexual body—a body open to or maybe yearning for deconstruction and queering. Knebl has performed in cooperation with Heimo Zobernig at Mumok, Vienna (2009), in Ich tier-Du Mensch, Perla Moda, Zürich (2010), Hard To Sell-Good To Have, Palais Sturany, vienna (2010), Open up Communication, Tanzquartier vienna, vienna (2009), Beautycontest, ACF, New York (2011), Reality Manifestos – Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, (2012), Camp/Anticamp, Hau 2, Berlin (2012), and at the Trans*_Homo*, Schwules Museum, Berlin, (2012). Prior to becoming an artist, Knebl worked for nine years as a careperson for the elderly.
Tim Stüttgen has studied film studies, fine art, and gender_queer theories in London, Hamburg, Maastricht, and Berlin. His research covers issues such as the history of pornography and post/pornography, performance art, the visual histories of black liberation and post/slavery, sexwork, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari. As curator and activist, he has organized symposia, conferences, and festivals like Post / Porn / Politics (2006, Volksbühne, Berlin), Genderpop! (2008, Goethe-Institut, Athens), and What’s Queer About Queer Pop? (2010, Hebbel-Am-Ufer, Berlin). He writes for various political and cultural magazines in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. For the past six years, he has performed as the drag queen Timi Mei Monigatti. Stüttgen lives and works in Berlin. His latest publication is Post Porn Politics – The Symposium Reader (2009, b_books, Berlin).
Elodie Pong is an artist and filmmaker whose work confronts personal and collective identity (de)construction, signs and systems of (mis)communication, and the overwhelming material of postmodern life. Her work has variously staged an encounter between Karl Marx and Marilyn Monroe (After the Empire, 2008), unmasked a pole-dancing panda (Je suis une bombe, 2006), and stitched together classic cinematic clips featuring “The End” (Endless Ends, 2009). She was formerly trained as a sociologist and anthropologist. Pong has received several awards and grants and her work is exhibited in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
Friday June 1st, 2012
DECENTERING LINES / ENTGRENZENDE LINIEN
What kind of lines would not create borders? How can lines shift—or even shatter—the center?
Invited performers: Artwork by Laylah Ali, Nana Adusei-Poku (Berlin), and Coco Fusco (New York).
Laylah Ali: Untitled, 2005, gouache painting, Courtesy: Laylah Ali.
This evening is organized in cooperation with the DFG graduate school Gender as a Category of Knowledge at Humboldt UniversityBerlin. The research group "Visual Culture" facilitates Coco Fusco's talk Torture and the Feminine Touch von Coco Fusco on May 31, 2012 at the ICI-Berlin.
