Jamie Crewe: Female Executioner

Gasworks presents Female Executioner, the first solo exhibition in London by Glasgow-based artist Jamie Crewe.

Comprising newly commissioned video, sculpture, print, and text-based works, the exhibition focuses on French writer Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel. Exploring what is at stake in historical reclamation, Female Executioner investigates what happens when a queer, transfeminine artist tries to touch, reflect on, or rehabilitate a historical work of fiction which seems to offer them ancestry.

First published in Belgium in 1884, Monsieur Venus describes a relationship between Raoule de Vénérande, a masculine aristocratic woman, and Jacques Silvert, a working class boy who becomes her mistress. Together, aided by Jacque’s sister Marie and Raoule’s friend the Baron de Raittolbe, the couple invert their genders, acting out a love fuelled by perverse innovation and tinged with sexual jealousy, conservatism and class power. In the end, the novel’s overarching Victorian morality falls upon its characters, and everyone is punished for their transgressions.

For Jamie, the novel’s frequent and nuanced cruelty complicates any wholly positive identification with the lead characters, who may at first seem like prototypes of modern-day transgender figuration. However, aspects of the novel still speak lucidly to contemporary trans experience, touching on issues that remain urgent, such as fraught relations with visibility and authenticity, pervasive experiences of trauma, and the threat of punishment and harm. Grappling with this painful ambivalence, Female Executioner stages, reworks and misreads the positive and negative, radical and moralising aspects of Monsieur Venus in relation the artist’s own personal history and experience of transness. In Jamie’s own words, “seething under its own references” the exhibition “tries to touch the past, and is struck by the past in response.”

Female Executioner is commissioned by Gasworks through the Freelands Artist Programme. Gasworks’ 2016–17 exhibitions programme is supported by Catherine Petitgas.

Exhibition events

Performance: Potash Lesson by Jamie Crewe
Wednesday, February 15, 7pm
Jamie Crewe presents Potash Lesson, a performance which ponders trans visibility, feminine pathologisation, and creative legacies with the help of an old video, a mistranslated play, a scene of humiliation, and a chemical stimulant.

Talk: Jamie Crewe and Mason Leaver-Yap
Wednesday, March 15, 7pm
Jamie Crewe discusses their practice with writer and curator Mason Leaver-Yap.

Screening: Cinenova | Now Showing
Thursday, March 23, 7pm
As part of Cinenova’s Now Showing series, Jamie Crewe presents a moving image work from Cinenova’s collection alongside a work of their own.
 

Residency events

Spring Open Studios
Open studios: Saturday, March 18, 12–6pm
Artists’ talks: Saturday, March 18, 4–5pm

Cocoy Lumbao (The Philippines), hosted in the Outset Residency Studio
Adriana Minoliti (Argentina), hosted in the Roberts Residency Studio
Catarina de Oliveira (Portugal), hosted in the Juan Yarur Torres Residency Studio
Ben Rosenthal (Switzerland), hosted in the Sackler Residency Studio

Gasworks’ current international artists in residence open their studios to the public throughout the day on Saturday, March 18. Open studios and artists’ talks offer London audiences a unique opportunity to see, hear about and discuss the research and work-in-progress that these artists have been developing during their residencies at Gasworks.

Gasworks current residencies are supported by Mercedes Zobel in partnership with Outset; arteBA in partnership with URRA; the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; and Pro Helvetia.