Friday, September 29 3pm Galerie Rabus

Nanna Lüth
What really happened to the Hermaphrodite Torso?

Using materials from the exhibition 1-0-1 intersex (NGBK Berlin, 2005), I will talk about ways of dealing with signs of intersexual or hermaphrodite (in)existences. How does the representation work of something that is and is not or at least is not wanted? The focus will be on the photograph "Hermaphrodite Torso" by Del LaGrace Volcano (London 2000) and its history of implementations in art and activism. Various appropriations of hermaphrodite representation play an important role in this process, whose artistic strategies are characterised both by disambiguation and ambiguation as deletion, highlighting and erasure, authentication and the inscribing or rewriting of models come into play.
I will refer to passages from Beatriz Preciado’s Manifiesto contrasexual, 2000 in which, following Suzanne J. Kessler, she describes criteria of gendering as aesthetic judgements, highlighting the power of visual systems for gendering processes.


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