Taxispalais - Kunsthalle Tirol

SEX

Sarah Decristoforo, Fabiana Faleiros, Alex Martinis Roe, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Ashley Hans Scheirl

5.10.2018 - 27.1.2019 - Thursday, 4th of October 2018, 7pm

Sex coincides with our being. The sex act is regarded as intimate, but causes the public sphere to culminate in personal space at the same time – as a singular expression and actualization of politics, as communication, as an arena of pleasure and fantasy, reproduction and violence. Just like sex, art is also paradoxical; both act within contradictions, in in-between-zones and opposites. They are accomplices of knowledge and at once producers of a sensual surplus that is resistant to the categories of knowledge.
Does the alliance of art and sex allow us to re-weave the customary infrastructures of excitement, withdrawal, pleasure and its discharge? Can we fantasize a grammar of future sex in which the aggression of pleasure does not serve to consolidate power relationships? 

The works by Sarah Decristoforo, Fabiana Faleiros, Alex Martinis Roe, Elisabeth von Samsonow and Ashley Hans Scheirl, most of which were realized specifically for this exhibition, generate non-normative experiments of sex in drawing, sculpture, video, sound and installation. What kind of visualizations, embodiments, apparatuses, settings, texts and tutorials permit us to anticipate a sexual economy that is based on excessive exchange and radical solidarity? How could we effectively edit the scripts of our sexual identities? What roles are played by prosthetic devices and hormones, citations and yoga, over-expenditure and waste, the clitoris and digital interfaces in this process?

Curated by Nina Tabassomi
taxispalais.art

Sketch "Staatsdildo", basswood, sockets, base, perspex, 195cm high, 2018