Intro

6. April – 18. June 2017, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Zanele Muholi, Doireann O’Malley, Johannes Paul Raether, Chris E. Vargas

Wild – Transgender and the Communities of Desire is an international group exhibition that draws together recent artworks dealing with questions and challenges of transgender life and communities, don’t necessarily present an inquiry into the complexities of transgenderism, but rather in this particular constellation of artworks transgenderism appears as a perspective framing and narrating current human (societal) conditions.

Inspired by scholar Jack Halberstam’s concept of “wild,” the exhibition looks at how gender complexities are forever challenging the binary mode of societal organization. The exhibition claims that these complexeties should not be narrated as “problems” or “difficulties,” but rather as a wild range of human possibilities. As Halberstam reminds us the notion of wild— reclaimed from its colonial historical context—in relation to societal models, offers “different narratives of what a life can be like in general.” A powerful and potent critique can thus emerge from the margins of society, in this case through transgender voices, strategies, and perspectives. Many of the artworks in Wild restage the possibilities of envisioning a different future in the present and on the ruins of its impoverished political imagination.

Curators: Edit Molnár & Marcel Schwierin