Disidentification
2 July – 31 October 2010
Opening:
2 July, 17-22
On the opening night Simon Fujiwara, recipient of the 2010 Cartier Art Award, will give two performances in his installation Welcome to the Hotel Munber.
Götaplatsen
SE-412 56 Göteborg
Sweden
Göteborgs Konsthall is proud to present the group exhibition Disidentification which will gather an exciting group of acclaimed international artists. Taking as a conceptual entry point José Esteban Muñoz thinking around the notion of Disidentification, the exhibition aims to investigate the production of modern and contemporary subjectivity and bring to the fore a discussion of the political potential of alternative ‘world-making’. Taking into consideration the role of the artist as author and the body as a site of inscription layered with meaning, the exhibition will highlight artists who explore the relationship between the body and larger political and ideological forces in ways that include alter-ego, masquerade, drag, metamorphosis and disguise.
The body in representations, in its physical presence and absence, visible only through traces and memories, form the entry point of investigation into real and imagined lives and worlds. In an engagement with modes of performativity in contemporary art practice, the exhibition seeks to explore the politics of representation in ways that aim to disrupt the desire of the viewing gaze and produces a displacement of perception and meaning. The exhibition will focus on artists who explore modes of performative self imaging in an interrogation of gender, sexual and racial difference. Disidentification presents works that use strategies of satire, exaggeration, disassembling and recycling of the language and stereotypes of hegemonic culture in order to deconstruct its’ seductive power and produce new social relations and subjectivities. Disidentificatory performances form dissident practices of revolt, mockery and a refusal to fit into neatly packages notions of identity and subjectivity. These are artists who open up difference as a possibility, and otherness beyond the self/other relationship that structures identity.
Artist Talks
Saturday 3 July, 14.00-15.00
Charlotte Gyllenhammar gives a presentation of her work Nachsagen, Ich und Meinhof.
Sunday 4 July, 14.00-15.00
Nick Cave gives a presentation of his works Soundsuits.
The Lab
October, 2010
In conjunction with the exhibition, Göteborgs Konsthall will host a two-day international symposium that aims to interrogate and elaborate on key questions explored in the exhibition and extend these questions into a broader consideration of the fields of feminist, queer and postcolonial enquiry. The symposium is organized in collaboration with Museion/School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg and will bring together national and international theorists, curators and artists.
The symposium aims to investigate the relationship between art and theory and to explore new articulations of contemporary subjectivities/identities. While contemporary art has increasingly come to illustrate prominent tendencies in contemporary critical theory, our ambition is to engage art as knowledge production which can contribute to the creation of new interpretive models and cross-frontier images. Initiating a set of dialogues within a cross disciplinary field of knowledge production, our wish is to reflect together with artists, curators and theorists to explore new modes of thinking about the construction of singularity and other emancipatory strategies today.
Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied with an online publication with articles by Paul Clinton, queer theorist, based in London and Gabi Ngcobo, South African curator and recent graduate from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Please visit: www.konsthallen.goteborg.se
Göteborgs Konsthall
Göteborgs Konsthall shows exhibitions reflecting the diversity of local and international contemporary art. The aim of our activities is to create a space that promotes dialogue with the present and mediates various approaches and models for working with visual art.
Opening hours
Tuesday – Thursday 11.00-18.00
Wednesday 11.00 – 20.00
Friday – Sunday 11.00-17.00
Monday closed
Admission free