I overflow. My desires have invented their own desires, my body knows unheard-of songs.
It is time to grab, to turn it around, to dislocate and let implode the status quo. Let yourself be absorbed by it, embrace it, take it in your mouth, bite this tongue with your own teeth to invent for ourselves a language to get inside of.. To devote yourself to something without knowing what it sounds like in advance. Not to worry about being incorrect when the “correct” does not exist. To search for something that does not yet exist. To be a spacious, singing body on which is grafted no one knows which self, more or less human, but alive because of transformation. Defiant dough kneading itself. We have to start communicating through our bodies, come up with an impregnable language that will break through barriers, classes and rhetorics, regulations, and codes, we must submerge, cut through, make it to the rock bottom and turn around. We have to empower ourselves.
Loose paraphrase Hélène Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa.
Barbora Kleinhamplová introduces works related to topics of power and collective trauma. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the film Irresistible which was created in collaboration with Mistress Velvet (she/they) and which was co-produced by Galerie TIC in 2021. The film opens up a space to reflect BDSM as a subversive sphere through which wider social change could take place thanks to individual initiatives. Mistress Velvet was a queer dominatrix from Chicago (originally from Ghana) but also a graduate of Gender Studies with focus on the African diaspora. Work in the sex industry became a part of their academic life. Clients who came to Velvet questioned their identities and worked with them to address patriarchal oppression and reparations through black feminist literature.
The film is a visual-poetical manifesto which centers on the protagonist as a potential agent of a future revolution. The film also unintentionally became a farewell to Mistress Velvet who unfortunately passed away in March of last year.
Working in dialogue with the film are additional layers that expand upon the film. Besides an older film, MPEG Girl, presenting a portrait of a porn actress Lída setting up a stark contrast to the emancipation position represented by Mistress Velvet in Irresistible, Kleinhamplová also presents objects and an audio-installation created specifically for this exhibition. The audio-installation was created in collaboration with Goddess Thea and Lucky.
