Body Sex, group exhibition, April 2014, Brunswick Street Gallery
curated by Miriam Arbus
Through the survey of 20 contemporary artists, BODY SEX, negotiates a range of societal conceptions. With each work, the artists examine the self-reflexivity involved in perception and the definitions that our bodies take on. Framed within contemporary contexts and considerations, this self-reflexivity is heightened. This exhibition expands and blurs the relationships that exist irrevocably between bodies, sex and sexualities. BODY SEX exudes both inner and outer aspects of body, dissuading associations of what is grotesque, taboo, or distasteful, applying fluidity rather than rigidity. The exhibiting work takes a unique approach to understanding our relationship to our bod(y)(ies), and embracing the struggle between autonomy, dependency, and our craving for intimacy and understanding.
BODY SEX implicates the viewer in the act of defining and subjugating the physical form—demanding that every viewer experience the artworks, going beyond personal assumptions, societal judgements, and each visual surface.
As such, BODY SEX enables consciousness in the definition, conception (and consumption) of body —highlighting the circularity between inner and outer perceptions in the process of classification. We see and define accordingly, inseparably from all discourses. This self-reflexive relationship is continuously bidirectional, with cause/effect occurring in simultaneity. BODY SEX, in acknowledging this endless self-reflexivity, perceives our bodies and sexualities to exist in a transcendent milieu – a need to connect.1
BODY SEX recognises that the rationally fixed ‘self’ is no longer relevant but rather self-directed concepts entailing constant slippage in definition (think Derrida, Foucault etc. and post-structuralist perceptions of the self). The body, sex, and sexual tendencies are embraced as intentional and conscious makings—that is, subjectively formed. Articulated by artist Gen Doy, ‘the concept of a fictional unitary Cartesian/Enlightenment self should be replaced by a notion of the self as fragmented, unstable, decentred and constructed by discourse.’2
Bodies: Natural, excessive, demure, unabashed, unveiled, exhibited, chaste, obscene, delicate, irreverent, idealized, exploited. Bodies immortilised, and celebrated in their whole or just in their sexual aspect, in their being ordinary or symbolically transfigured and able to express new, unexpected meanings. BODY SEX initiates expanding conversation though the use of visual culture, considering the body as fluid in definition, body, sex, gender, and mortality—pushing our pre, and mis-conceptions, bodies and sex into the spotlight.
1 Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986
2 Gen Doy, Picturing the Self, 2005, p.2