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Artists: Gülsün
Karamustafa, Nanna Buhl Debois,
Gitte Villesen & Lars Erik Frank,
Katya Sander, Maryam Jafri
SparwasserHQ 19. april til
30. maj, 2003
Curator: Sanne
Kofod Olsen
"Breaking the Law
(part one)"
The theme of the exhibition is that of breaking the conventions
that we find in society when it comes to gendered roles. Specificly
a society that is still structured around the logics of patriarchy
and thus patriarchal historical and cultural representations.
The consideration is this: every norm that we meet in daily life
is a representation of conventions within partriarchal society,
and every history written is a reflection of these conventions
unless it (the written history) is set forth to analyze and investigate
the nature/structure of this kind of conventionalism.
The title "Breaking the Law" is referring to
two related concepts within Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis:
that of the "Name of the Father" which stands in relation
to the "Law (of the Phallos)".
The Law is build upon the fear of the death of the father. The
Name of the Father is replacing the fear of the death of the
father. It is the symbolic meaning of the father and in virtue
of which he functions legislatively. The Name of the Father appears
in the symbolic order, when the Mother is set out of the game
as the primary person (nutritiuous) and the psychological significance
of the father is beginning to take place.
In psychoanalysis these concepts are always connected to the
sexuality of the subject and defined in relation to the constitution
of the subject. However they can be read on a more abstract level
as fundamental concepts of these gendered roles defined in Western
society. The Law and the Name of the Father can be seen as key
elements in patriarchal representation. These concepts are in
themselves seen as conventional reflections of patriarchal representations,
since they are indeed reflecting not only gender stereotypes
and gendered roles but the constituation of the hierarchies between
the gendered subjects.
This is not an attempt to rewrite psychoanalysis, which is merely
seen as a reflection in itself, but to analyze some possibilities
of how breaking these conventions can be done. Psychoanalysis
calls breaking the law perversion, however seen on a more concrete
level in relation to sexuality. But this can also be abstracted
in relation to generel representation. To call breaking a self-constituted
law perversion seems to be an act of protection of one's own
hierarchical representation and to criminalize and sicken the
tendency to think in other ways.
A poststructuralist critique of psychoanalysis and the signification
of the Phallus as a priviledged signifier, that it can have a
priviledge status at all, is of course evident. The denial of
the conventional processes of signification in relation to the
gendered subject formulated in psychoanalysis, which is being
found in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipe is fundamental for
this understanding, as well as is Judith Butler's critique of
conventional and essentialist thinking about gender. The idea
of a performative subject lies within this scheme, as a mere
possibility of even attempting to break the law of the patriarchal
representational system.
The artists invited to participate
in this exhibition is seems to make an attempt in one way or
another. |