"Hast du Lust?" Group Show, Improper Walls: Art proved to be an essential tool to draw attention to social and environmental issues throughout history. After speaking about the general shame surrounding the symptoms of mental disorders, for this year's Mental Health Awareness Month, we are using contemporary art to discuss the role of mental health within the context of sexual pleasure. With the persevering stigma and lack of sex education, we need every opportunity and medium to open up a discussion on these topics, particularly their interconnectedness. Michael Robert Jimenez '12 has an installation in this show called "alien self". The installation is about that part of ourselves from which we cower, that we have made foreign because of the dirtied mirror from which we learned to view ourselves. It is about how intimacy starts in subtler, filthier ways of self. In a world of others, how do we find space for the conception of ourselves? How much of how we see ourselves is how others have seen us? Should we cleanse ourselves of others so that we may be ourselves? To say it is only about washing oneself is to obfuscate the feeling that sometimes "being clean" is not about dirt but rather abstracted filth. In times of insecurity and anxiety, it is about trying to save oneself, to find oneself underneath the invisible layers of others, those transactions of unintelligible touch. Maybe it is like drowning in the liquid of sequential abstractions of fathomable threats, and cleaning is like grasping at that liquid, trying to get out from it, to breathe again — only to look up at the mirror at oneself in dirtying doubt, to find the soap itself is filth, and to find the hand towel is shamefully lost to the floor. Do it again. Shame and guilt cannot be washed away with soap. As a queer person, anxieties about the interface between the inward and the outward, about that boundary of self and what intimacy can mean, lead to coping mechanisms of hiding, of alienating oneself for the sake of others. In this way, queer expression is dirtied with parts of others, being touched by someone you may not know, presently or even before you were born.
Vernissage: May 25, 7-10 PM Exhibition: May 26 - June 24, Wed - Fr, 3 - 7 PM Performance by Marko Markovic: May 25, 8 PM “Open Mic” hosted by ZIMT: June 2, 6 PM Installation "(un)telling pleasure" by puro conjuro (part I): June 8, 5-8 PM Screening of a short film “AUTOAGGRESSION” by Martin Willibald Meisl: June 9, 8PM Installation "(un)telling pleasure" by puro conjuro (part II): June 24, 7PM
Location/Venue Name: Improper Walls, Reindrofgasse 42, 1150 Vienna, Austria
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Other Website: http://improperwalls.com/events/2022/5/25/hast-du-lust