“Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” Exhibition
The New Museum of Contemporary Art
This event has ended.
“Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” is a multipart project that explores the idea of sexual and gender “difference” after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics. The exhibition draws from Motta’s database documentary wewhofeeldifferently.info that consists of a website, publication, online journal, and discursive events. Conceived as a platform to engage critical issues of contemporary queer culture, collective memory, and activism in the Museum as Hub space, “We Who Feel Differently” will present a video
installation drawing from fifty interviews with LGBTIQQ academicians, activists, artists, politicians, researches, and radicals from Colombia, Norway, South Korea, and the United States, exploring notions of equality versus difference, citizenship, and democracy. The interviews address the history and development of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning movements and experiences, proposing the notion of difference as a profound strategy for alliance building, solidarity, and self-determination.
The exhibition is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.
During the run of the exhibition, Motta will activate the Museum as Hub by organizing collective readings, conversations, and events, including a “Sketchy Walk” with Juan Betancurth and Todd Shalom, a workshop on HIV/AIDS activism by QUEEROCRACY, a lecture about queer and feminist theologies by Jared Gilbert, a conversation about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” by Against Equality, and a debate about transgender issues in contemporary art moderated by art historian Jeannine Tang and activist Reina Gossett.
On May 4 and 5, 2012, in advance of the exhibition opening, the New Museum will present “We Who Feel Differently: A Symposium” organized by Carlos Motta and performance studies scholar Reagan Truax-O’Gorman. Engaging the intersections of contemporary art, activism, and scholarship, the two-day symposium considers the framework of sexual and gender difference as developed through Motta’s project. Symposium participants include Julian Carter, Associate Professor of Critical Studies at California College of the Arts; Mathias Danbolt, Editor of trikster.net; Dr. Tiger Howard Devore, Intersex Activist; Reina Gossett, Trans activist; E. Patrick Johnson, Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University; Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward; José Muñoz, Professor of Performance Studies at New York University; Ann Pellegrini, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University; Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad, Norwegian Trans activist; and Emily Roysdon, artist. Performances by queer artists, including Malik Gaines, will be part of the symposium.
Motta’s “We Who Feel Differently” presents five thematic threads that document and frame an international and intergenerational conversation about non-normative sexual and gender difference:
The Equality Framework: Stop Begging for Tolerance, gathers opinions about the conceptual perspective that guides the claim for rights and validates their recognition by the State. Grounded in ideals of equality, this framework incites doubt and frustration that has lead to productive discussions about the limits of legal formalism and liberal tolerance and the need for a more substantive moral debate.
Defying Assimilation: Beyond the LGBT Agenda assembles perspectives on “difference.” It vindicates a critical and affective difference that expresses skepticism about legal responses, reluctance to assimilation, and resistance to normative conditioning and discipline. The interviewees articulate ways to deal with these circumstances and the actions they have undertaken to empower themselves and others.
Gender Talents brings together the voices of trans and intersex activists and thinkers who reject the binary system that organizes gender and sexuality. Their ideas aim at broadening the possibilities of an individual beyond convention. They also struggle to avoid classifications and to abolish all forms of control over nonnormative lives and bodies.
Silence, Stigma, Militancy and Systemic Transformation: From ACT UP to AIDS Today offers a brief description of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the United States and of some of the strategies used by this social movement to confront the government’s response to the AIDS epidemic from the perspective of some of its members. They also reflect on the status of AIDS today.
Queering Art Discourses provides an analysis of the reign of silence surrounding discourse on sexuality in art and discusses the works of cultural producers that attempt to break this silence.
“We Who Feel Differently” attempts to reclaim a queer “We” that values difference over sameness, a “We” that resists assimilation, and a “We” that embraces difference as a critical opportunity to construct a socially just world.
Media
Schedule
from May 16, 2012 to September 09, 2012
Artist(s)
Carlos Motta et al.