GUERRILLA PORNFARE: ART & THE POLITICS OF PORN
@ ]performance s p a c e [ , London
Saturday 13 July 2013
As part of the event PERFORMING PORN (after the computer became boring)
SCREENING WITH ARTISTS:
Ingrid Berthon-Moine | Liad Hussein Kantorowicz and Kate Ehrhardt | Jenny Hval | Maria Llopis | Clément Lyonnet | Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova | Claudia Squitieri | Diana Torres | Andrzej Wojtas and Ewelina Aleksandrowicz a.k.a. Pussykrew
PERFORMING PORN (after the computer became boring) is concerned with the intersections of performance art and pornography, in the context of changing experiences of everyday technologies. The event will consist of performances, video artwork, artefacts, and talks.
For the purpose of this conference, we interrogate the passivity of the individual user/consumer through an exploration of active, re-active and transgressive art that highlights this technocapitalist alert in the slim line between porn and politics.
The highly-mediated environment of technocapitalism is changing the way today’s subjects understand, generate, and experience pleasure: from online porn channels to media news broadcasts, the user is flooded by an abundance of images and information that typically demand participation merely in the form of private ‘consumption’, albeit at an ever-accelerating rate. What is promised by many of these highly mediated experiences of multiple stimulations is the effect of pleasure. Yet, they also seem to be paradoxically complicit in the procession of certain forms of de-politicising states of de-sensitivisation and numbness, which are diminishing the subject’s critical capacity to feel and act, while at the same time encouraging passive consumption of products, ideas, and the other’s promises of better life. If so, are there ways to engage in an alternative economy of bodies and pleasures as a form of resistance to this ‘systematic numbness’? How can pleasure serve the political?
Through a showcase of active, re-active and transgressive post-porn art that highlights this technocapitalist alert in the slim line between porn and politics, Guerrilla Pornfare will address the vexed question of whether our global porn-saturated digital environment can re-awaken and stimulate our bodies and desires.
Curated by Giulia Casalini and Ana Grahovac with the support of the artists and Diana Georgiou.