Peaches: Whose Jizz Is This? / Sarah Abu Abdallah: For the First Time in a Long Time

The Kunstverein in Hamburg is delighted to present the solo exhibition Whose Jizz Is This? by Peaches and the solo exhibition For the First Time in a Long Time by Sarah Abu Abdallah. We cordially invite you to our opening on August 9, 7pm.

Peaches: Whose Jizz Is This?
Kunstverein in Hamburg presents Whose Jizz Is This? (WJIT) the first institutional solo exhibition of the musician and artist Peaches. On the 20th anniversary of her stage debut, Peaches takes a trans-disciplinary and transgressive approach to expanding the format of “the exhibition” by creating a living organism.

Whose Jizz Is This? takes Peaches’ many-sided practice—including her musical productions and live performances—as the starting point to present sculptural, photographic, film and text works in an immersive environment. All works have been created for this exhibition. Ever adept at boundary blurring, Peaches has created a show that combines live performance, musical intervention, visual art and historical reflection. Taking a bold and unexpected approach to the topics of sex, feminism, queerness, gender, and new millennium politics, Peaches calls her WJIT presentation “a deconstructed musical with 14 scenes.”

At the heart of this presentation are the “Fleshies,” sex toys known as Double Masturbators, who first interact with humans and then break away from them and find pleasure within themselves, repudiating their appointed identity, and, in the process, decentering a destructive and narcissistic human world—and starting a revolution.

The exhibition is developed in cooperation with Internationales Sommerfestival at Kampnagel.
The exhibition is supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Embassy of Canada, Berlin and Canada Council for the Arts.

Sarah Abu Abdallah: For the Fist Time in a Long Time
Sarah Abu Abdallah (*1990 in Qatif, Saudi Arabia) works with video, painting, text and installation. Her visual worlds are influenced by ever-changing surroundings between her travels and her home in Saudi, the visual data streams of the Internet, and the pop culture in the Gulf area among others. Her works are conducted by a search for a self and a sense of belonging. How does both manifest themselves in public and private space, especially through different framework conditions? Fragmentarily combined text and image material in this investigation refers to the transience of memories and to moments of anxiety in an ever faster spinning world. Abu Abdallah’s works are full of poetry. Recurring motifs are moments of disappearance and destruction as well as questions of gender-specific coding and restrictions in the domestic and public spheres - also against the background of her role as a female artist in Saudi society. A central aspect in all her works is the metaphor of untamed nature versus nature restrained by man.
The artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe combines two films and new paintings into one comprehensive installation.The Salad Zone (2013) focuses on everyday life. Abu Abdallah examines the absolute, the prescribed and the absurd of social agreements in a time of abundance and the resulting constructions of fear. The second film, The House That Ate Them Whole (2018), tells the allusive story of a house that devours its tenants while dreaming of freeing itself from its static situation. The microcosm of the domestic space is here linked to the socio-political issues of our society. This can also be seen in a large-format painting installation that, like a wall frieze, covers a wide part of the exhibition space.

The exhibition is a coproduction with Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, where it will open in December 2019, and will be accompanied by the first monograph of the artist in collaboration with Art Jameel. The exhibition and the catalogue were supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung under its support prize “Catalogues for Young Artists”.