Bubblegum Club

Tag: power structures

  • ‘Trembling Thought’ – a solo exhibition in Katharien de Villiers’ studio

    ‘Trembling Thought’ – a solo exhibition in Katharien de Villiers’ studio

    An amalgamation of colour, image, sound and installation. An artist’s studio showcases a new body of work Trembling Thought presented by SMITH Studio. The meeting of traditional and non-traditional media. A world built from Katharien de Villiers’ memory and curated by her hand. As if walking on to an 80’s sci-fi film set. Small animals glare through luminous eye slits. The viewer is asked to engage with work through various entry points.

    The expansive new body of work takes interest in uncertainty and virtual reality. The nucleus of Trembling Thought is that of the instability of memory. The show itself is described by the artist as “A recorded library of warped memory”.

    Creating from her own memory, the unreliable nature of one’s own recollections is celebrated. In uncertainty, she finds multiplicity and potential. In Trembling Thought De Villiers acts in order to materialise both the desires and power structures prevalent in the reproduction of memory.

    I spoke to the artist to reveal more about her process and thought behind the new body of work:

    Process and the audience’s engagement/dissection of process is of prevalence in this body of work. Why is it so important?

    As an artist, I have always been acutely aware of my disengagement from work by the time it is put on show for viewers. In this awareness I try to create spaces within which viewers can find their own entrance points in the work, allowing them to build a personal relationship with the work independent of my artistic intention, but within the spatial elements of my truth and curation.

    In your artist bio it is stated that thinking is broader than the work itself. How do works and concepts correlate? Do they not carry the same amount of weight? Are artworks then a tool to access the thought conveyed?

    Saying thinking is broader than the work itself is just another jab at the overwhelming process of creating works which can live beyond a singular intention. I wouldn’t call the work “tools”, since somehow that in itself designates purpose and outcome. The artworks serve as elements which can be placed in different relations to one another, form new combinations of thought and generate a multitude of rational conclusions. The works become to thought what letters are to words; when placed in new combinations meaning can be altered in the blink of an eye.

    Is Virtual Reality employed as a way to speak about uncertainty?

    The new understanding of virtual reality speaks of an artificiality which is not applicable to this body of work. This is a more personal version of virtual reality. Personal memories and first-hand experiences make up the content of “Trembling Thought”. It is the forced nature of the elements’ relationship in the works, the surreal scale and shifting perspectives that initiate the sense of uncertainty which ultimately guides the viewer through a trembling world of forced relations.

    What is this potential that is found in uncertainty and warped memory?

    Potential in as much as the outcome of thought in relation to the work is not designated or pre-destined. The viewers find themselves confronted with my memories, memories which have already started cross-breeding and hybridizing with other experiences and memories of my own. The potential and uncertainty exists in the very nature of these memories and memory’s natural inclination to bend, break and form new truths.

    The new body of work has a self-reflexive quality. How do you think audience members will be able to identify with this personal project?

    “Trembling Thought” expects a huge amount of engaging energy from the viewer. Through the process of curation, I wanted to amplify the feeling of a labyrinth, or that the viewer is in fact strolling through my mind. As an artist, I have never quite been able to create beyond personal experience. It would seem arbitrary to speak in a voice that isn’t my own. The viewers greatest power lies in their ability to respond to visual stimulus and relate from an individual perspective and personal archive of memory.

    Please unpack what is meant by “…to materialise the desires and power structures at play while we reproduce memory.”? What are these power structures and desires and why and how would memory be reproduced?

    Memory, in my opinion, has a morphing hierarchy, which is informed by desire. Desire is ultimately what drives memory to discard or accumulate. In a way memory’s ability to organically grow, shrink and generally change shape makes it its own reproductive system – I was simply the catalyst in the physical rendering of these thoughts.

    Dualities seem to be of much importance. Could you please elaborate on this?

    The doubling of elements (such as fat cops or snarling dogs) is a mental process of visualization. Repeating elements becomes a way of engaging with the hierarchy of memory and the potential of repeating elements in new combinations. Duality could of course also refer to both physical and emotive contrast in the works.

    Does the work Kinetic Window attempt to make a commentary on the physicality of modern art and where it is found spatially?

    ‘Kinetic Window’ is an exploration of the Post-modern obsession with meaning and understanding in art. I often feel that viewers expect a conclusive emotional or intellectual understanding of art and the accompanying sound piece elaborates on this concern. It is problematic for viewers to expect understanding if they refuse to engage with works from their personal archive of knowledge.

     

    Trembling Thought was presented as a one-night art event in the Artist’s studio showcasing an elaborate body of work. The show included new paintings and a number of moving installations as seen earlier this year at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. The event took place on the 14th of June, however, the artist is available for studio visits in the month after the show to discuss her process and take collectors through her work.

     

  • Thinking about de-gendering as a route to personhood

    Thinking about de-gendering as a route to personhood

    So the first time I encountered the term ‘cisgender’ was on my colourful Twitter timeline. Some troll was ignorantly spewing his privilege and a beautiful bisexual boy that I follow called the troll a “cisgender straight white male” while telling him to take several seats.

    After tediously Googling the term, I was informed that being “cisgender” means that your gender identity matches the sex that you were assigned at birth. So basically when you were born your physical attributes, which are anatomically and physiologically predetermined, and your internal conviction that you are either male or female, plus the cultural behavioural expressions of those convictions, all marry each other harmoniously.

    When the beautiful bisexual boy was calling out that troll, “cisgender” sounded like a swear word because how could one body have so much hegemonic power, such unadulterated privilege. It seemed obscene until I realised I am cisgender and confronting this privilege was bewildering since other components that make up my identity, such as race, nationality, sex and sexuality are not necessarily hegemonic.

    Initially, I was confronted by my cisgender privilege a couple of years ago when I approached a public restroom that did not have the universal male or female signage. Instead the figure on the door was just a person, which I certainly am, but this privilege of fitting comfortably at one end of the sex/gender binary made me question if I even belonged in that gender neutral space because hello hi, the entire world has created public restrooms, and every other space, on the dominant societal  assumption that everyone is cisgender. This prolonged perpetuation of the sex/gender binary has caused for the maintenance of gender inequality. As a human being dedicated to the decolonisation of my mind, walk through this with me as I unpack how de-gendering is crucial to decolonisation (decolonisation in this context being the undoing of hegemonic “norms” and mindsets.)

    Firstly, let’s get this one thing clear, “nature” does not dictate how we perform gender, instead we do as producers of our culture. The assignment of sex at birth is based on our understanding of gender identity. So girls have uteruses and boys have penises. This basic arrangement of gender and other various subtle and overt arrangements of gender are reproduced socially by power structures in order to shape individual action, and because of the histories of the powers that be, these arrangements appear solid.  Therefore it is dominant ideologies that perpetuate the sex/gender binary in order to maintain power dynamics.

    I believe that if we started with discarding sex assignment at birth as a “regulatory practice” that “institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female’” then we could ultimately de-gender society and “true humanism” could be realised and instituted (Judith Butler). Being freed from these shackles of the sex/gender binary allows individuals to step into a personhood that is not regulated by hegemonic norms or socially prescribed ways of being and interaction.

    However, this immediate route to de-gendering is essentialist. We are still part of a world that has “norms” and ideals that are deeply interwoven into our social fabric. For example, the social construction of the female body and the normalisation of the male body has considered the female body as “the other”. This othering of the female body is based on anatomy and physiology and this othering also seeps into the subjugation of a feminine expression of gender. Femininity is still assumed to be debilitating. People with female bodies and whose gender expression is feminine are victims of oppression. Hence histories that reflects the need to implement equality constitutionally, institutionally and domestically.

    So before we can de-gender, I believe we need to de-cisgender first. There are and always have been and there still will be many more individuals who are non-binary, transgender and queer. Forget my privileged gender neutral experience, there are people who wake up every day compromising how they navigate their existence because of this idea that there are only two sexes and their manifestation should either be masculine or feminine depending on their body. I believe that once cisnormativity and its partner in crime, heteronormativity, are overthrown from our mindsets and understanding of bodies and sexuality, then surely the superiority of the male body and masculine expression would collapse?

    It is important to realise that the crux of our minor differences are what these dominant ideologies that perpetuate oppression are built on. It is about damn time that we interrogate this social construct and unlearn how we have been taught to prescribe ideas onto our bodies as well other people’s bodies.

    Only once the intricate hierarchies involved in our understanding of gender are undone then we can move into the dismantling phase of the entire construct: no body will be categorised and no personhood presumed in accordance. Essentially, people could simply be people.