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ÉMILIE JOUVET
EMANCIPATED SPECTATRESS
November 15 - December 5,
2013
You are
cordially invited to attend the
opening of the exhibition on Friday, 15th
November, at 8 pm at ©kuc Gallery.
In hot,
psychotropic punk capitalism, as the theoretician Beatriz
Preciado calls the dominant economic model, which absorbs
all forms of resistance, we are witnessing a new regime of
regulation of sex and sexual subjectivity: the so-called
pharmacopornographic regime which has replaced the
disciplinary regime of the 19th century.
Preciado
experiments with gender and takes testosterone not to become
a man or as some kind of trans strategy, but rather to
prevent her from turning into what society wanted her to
become. To "write, fuck and feel” a “postpornographic” form
of pleasure. As she states, she has added a "molecular
prosthesis" to her low-tech transgendered identity composed
of dildos, texts and moving images. She takes “T” to avenge
the death of her beloved one.
In Testo
Junkie* the male and female gender are perceived as
“bio-political fictions”. Clearly, what is at stake here is
not the transformation from woman to man or vice versa, but
the “contamination of the molecular base of production of
sexual difference” , with the insight that these two
“natural” states (man and woman) are only “somatic effects
of the technical process of normalisation.”
Contrary
to the above mentioned “copyleft biopolitical agent”, with
whom she shares a common feminist project, Judith Jack
Halberstam believes that at least potentially, as an option,
there are forms that cannot be easily absorbed. This is
explored in “Gaga Feminism”, which can be placed in the
context of “wild theory” – a somewhat fictive term for
theory that emerged recently, which breaks with orthodoxy
and “experiments with knowledge, art and the imagination”,
although it is aware of the “constraints under which all
three operate”. Halberstam establishes “impossible”
relations between the anarchist Emma Goldman and the
theorist José Esteban Muñoz in order to form a theoretical
basis for a “wild archive” of contemporary art practices.
She stresses that the latter articulates (queer) utopia not
as a place, but as a “horizon”, as a “mode of possibility”,
a queer future that “is not an end, but an opening”.
The
artistic practice of Émilie Jouvet is inscribed into this
“emerging field of shifting identities, active communities
and political dreams”, which has already been discussed by
“gender talents” at the experimental congress Charming for
the Revolution.**
Jouvet has
been tracking queer and feminist movement in “the former
West” for fifteen years. While Europe takes its last
breaths, the Paris and Berlin based artist critically
engages in creating an “impermanent, unstable, imperfect”
archive of revolutionary emancipatory movements that
together with the LGBT movement form one of the major
upheavals of the 20th century. The multitude still
resonates, or rather, it is present here and now. This is an
archive-in-the-making, a performative archive, within which
the artist examines two urgent issues of our times, gender
and sexuality, through endless modulations, reconfigurations
and openings. She tackles the complex questioning of these
two categories by using the medium of photography, video and
film, all of which have acquired the status of ‘art’ rather
late due to market pressure and the fact that the dominant
narrative of the West is painting.
For the
exhibition in ©kuc Gallery, Émilie Jouvet made a new
constellation of photographs in which protagonists from
urban cities, crucial for the development of LGBTQI culture
and movement “travel between genders”. The constellation, a
counterpoint to linear way of perceiving history ***,
consists also of two films: Roof opens up the issue of
participation or rather its (im)possibility, while One Night
Stand is a complex and juicy investigation of women and
queer sexuality.
To sum up:
Émilie Jouvet's practice is about decolonizing gender and
representations of sexuality, which are, as Preciado would
put it, counterhegemonic.
Rosana
Sancin, curator
* Feminist
Press, New York, 2013.
** Tate
Modern, London, 1-2 February 2013.
*** Simon
Sheikh/Walter Benjamin.
ACCOMPANYING EVENTS
We invite
you to attend the discussion with
the artist Émilie Jouvet, which will take place
on Saturday, 16th November at 6 pm and to a
guided tour of the exhibition
with the curator Rosana Sancin on Thursday, 28th November at
6 pm.
Kindly
supported by:
Special
thanks to:
Dr. Marina Gr¾iniæ and
Jasmina ©epetavc.
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