Saturday 9 August, 12 – 5pm
A Post-Gender World

Click here for our Eventbrite page to book return travel from Cambridge train station for this event. Transport will leave Cambridge station at 11.30am and return to the station at 5pm. Trains from London Kings Cross travel to Cambridge every 30 mins and the journey time is 45 mins. This event is FREE.

Join us for the fifth and final event in our Futurecamp series which explores how the complexities of social and philosophical interpretations of gender and identity are formed and enacted. With contributions, including new performances created for this event, from d3signbur3au, Zackary Drucker, Berivan Erdogan, Rhys Ernst, Richard John Jones, Rachel Maclean, Anne McGuire, Tracey Rose, James Richards, Leslie Thornton and Jessica Wiesner.

Event premise:

Is there a future in which humans can, and will want to, move beyond the biological and social constructions of gender? The ever increasing mediatisation of life has created a form of self-objectification unlike ever before, regardless of gender. Alongside this, questions around the presentation of girls and women has led to a heated public debate and a dramatic resurgence of feminist discourse within the mainstream media and politics. This event explores discourses around gender and identity, with artists and within their work.

Programme:

Richard John Jones' installation Keeping Watch Above the Flowers (2014) is an assemblage of collected images juxtaposing wilderness paintings of the Hudson River School with photographs of women manufacturing camouflage netting during WWII. Although historically and stylistically distinct, the two forms interplay with one another alluding to the question of historical erasure, the cultural specificity of the pictorial gaze and the duplicity of camouflage and recognition.

12pm: Welcome and introduction 

12.10pm: Jess Wiesner presents a new performance. Using video juxtaposed with live event, she will address  the notion of retainment in relation to contrary behaviour and its future implications on gender identity and expectations. By the way, what was Pepé Le Pew about anyway, and whatever happened to the undercat?

12.20pm: Screeing of Meanwhile (2013) by Berivan Erdogan. Selected by Futurecamp artist James Richards.

12.30pm: Collective d3signbur3au will present a narrative based on the post-gender character they have created, Agatha Valkyrie Ice, within the framework of social media. By inserting Agatha within established social media systems, d3signbur3au attempt to observe and analyse the clashes and controversies this move creates, whilst speculating on the current condition of neoliberal subjectivity through a feminist perspective.

1pm: Break

1.30pm: Futurecamp residency artist Tracey Rose presents elements of a new performance she is developing entitled KniggerKhaffirKhoon or KKK, which seeks to address issues of race, post-colonial heritage, the slave trade, modern media depictions of African Americans, and African, particularly South African, political and social dynamics.

1.50pm: Screening of When I Was A Monster (1996) and Joe Dimaggio 1, 2, 3 (1991) by Anne McGuire. When I Was A Monster is a video of a performance by McGuire examining her experiences and body during the aftermath of an accident. Joe Dimaggio 1, 2, 3 sees McGuire secretley follow and serenade Joe Dimaggio in her car, as he strolls the docks, unaware that McGuire is videotaping his every step. Selected by Futurecamp residency artist James Richards.

2.10: Break

2.30pm: Screening of Futurecamp residency artist Rachel Mclean’s Over The Rainbow (2013). Inspired by the Technicolor utopias of children's television, Over The Rainbow invites the viewer into a shape-shifting world inhabited by cuddly monsters, faceless clones and gruesome pop divas. Commissioned by The Banff Centre, Canada and The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. Funded by Creative Scotland.

3.10pm: Break

3.30pm: Screening of Sahara/Mojave (2006) by Leslie Thornton, which the artist describes as a "little trip to Hollywood via North Africa, circa 1900. I hone an 'aesthetics of uncertainty' to question our understanding of the real." Selected by Futurecamp residency artist James Richards.

3.45pm: Discussion with artists Richard John Jones, Rachel Maclean, Tracey Rose, James Richards and Jess Weisner, chaired by Kathy Noble

4.30pm: The first UK screening of She Gone Rogue (2012) by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst. “Darling” (played by Zackary Drucker) attempts to visit her “Auntie Holly” but instead falls down a rabbit hole, encountering a series of confounding, nebulous, complicated and contradictory trans-feminine archetypes. She Gone Rogue was written and produced by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, who also and directed it. It stars Zackary Drucker, Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal David, Flawless Sabrina, Rhys Ernst’s and Zackary’s parents, with an original score by Ellen Reid.

5pm: Event ends

Click here for our Eventbrite page to book return travel from Cambridge train station for this event.

Contributor Biographies

d3signbur3au is a collective comprising of Dorota Gaweda, Egle Kulbokaite and Catherine Österberg established in 2013.

Zackary Drucker is an artist who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality and seeing. Her participatory art works complicate established binaries of viewer and subject, insider and outsider, and male and female in order to create a complex image of the self. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals including the 54th Venice Biennale–Swiss Off-Site Pavilion; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; MOMA PS1; Deitch Projects; Leo Koenig Inc, the Hammer Museum and REDCAT in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angelese.

Rhys Ernst is a writer/director who places multidimensional queer/trans characters within larger narratives, complicating (trans) gender representation in film and video. The Thing (2012) premiered at Sundance 2012 and She Gone Rogue premiered at the 2012 “Made in LA” Los Angeles Biennial at the Hammer Museum and subsequently in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and “Fan the Flames” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Past screening venues include Oberhausen, Chicago International Film Festival, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in Los Angeles at UCLA Hammer Museum, REDCAT and LACE.

Richard John Jones is an artist based in Amsterdam. Jones was co-director of the artist-run space Auto Italia South East in London between 2011 and 2012. His work explores the act of withdrawal and the notion of the performative silence drawing on a history of anti-assimilationist queer movements, camouflage and also the occult; namely practices of witch-craft, neo-paganism and ritual. He is questioning how this interacts with our contemporary preoccupation with visibility and recognition as key emancipatory paradigms.

Rachel Maclean makes videos that combine a multitude of aesthetic and performative tropes from pop videos, YouTube performances and commercials to nursery rhymes, creating day-glo, hyper-real compositions, in which she performs all the characters herself. These works address contemporary identity and consumption in work that could only have been made in today’s ‘post-Internet’ world. Recent and upcoming solo-exhibitions include The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Glasgow Film Festival, (2014); I HEART SCOTLAND, as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and Germs, for Channel 4 Random Acts (2013). Rachel Maclean lives and works in Glasgow.

Anne McGuire is a San Francisco-based video, sound and performance artist, who uses video as a confessional tool, a device to record her difficult and traumatic personal experiences for public consumption and as such, is always a presence in her videos, whether or not she’s in front of the lens. Her work has been shown as part of exhibitions and screenings at such institutions as the Tate Gallery, London, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, YYZ Artists Outlet, Toronto, and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art.

Tracey Rose works with performance, film and photography to make work that addresses the complexity of gender, sexuality and racial identities, usually performing as multiple characters, allowing her to play with the ambiguity that this creates. Rose has had solo presentations in Europe, the Americas and Africa, and has been featured in major international events such as the Venice Biennale in 2001 and group exhibitions such as Africa Remix (2005), Hayward Gallery, London, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Tracey Rose: Waiting for God, the artist’s mid-career survey show, was held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2011) and Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden, (2012). In 2014 Rose had a solo exhibition, (x), at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.​

James Richards works primarily between moving image, sound and sculpture, often merging these forms within individual works to interrogate the experience of what it is to view and be viewed. Richards is a current Turner Prize nominee and was a 2012 recipient of the Derek Jarman award. Recent solo exhibitions include The Screens, RODEO, Istanbul (2013); James Richards at CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (2012); and Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off at Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011) and Tate Britain (2010). He lives and works in Berlin and London.

Leslie Thornton's experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media, where form and content are co-extensive. She has been honored with the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and the Maya Deren Award. Thornton's film and media works have been exhibited worldwide including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Biennial Exhibition; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Rotterdam International Film Festival; New York Film Festival; capcMusée, Bordeaux; and Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley. Thornton is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Jess Wiesner is an artist who works and lives in London.