Advance Notice: Gender in Digital Reality

Opening program on Tuesday, 20 February 2018, Klingenstrasse 23 Zürich:

6-9 pm: Opening of the exhibition
6.30-7 pm: Performance by Martina Mächler
7-9 pm: Multimedia installation by Philip Tsapaliras, Paula Ursprung and Artemisia Valisa

The group exhibition explores the performance of gender roles in our society within the context of digital medias. Social medias are situated at the interface between the private and public spheres, and are where current trends traversing all social strata and age classes become most rapidly visible. These medias are also places of self-representation and its correlating performativity. For these reasons these medias ideally lend themselves to the inquiry into our core theme of the performativity of gender roles.

In connection with the exhibition location, an appraisal of the interplay between digital medias and analogue carriers will take place, including how the two condition each other. Can virtual worlds survive without analogue hosts, and what do they require to perform themselves? Vice versa, this raises the question to what extent analogue medias serve their digital counterparts – when for instance books open up virtual spaces – and how, in this process, statement impact is transformed.

The theoretical framework for the exhibition concept derives from Judith Butler’s 1988 text “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” that examines subjects such as gender and gender roles and that established the foundations of Queer Theory.
Thirty years after the appearance of Butler’s text, what does the situation look like now? What are the identifiable subversive forms by which gender roles are undermined? What influence do social medias have on the constitution of gender roles? These and others are the questions pursued in the exhibition GENDER IN DIGITAL REALITY.

With Magdalena Baranya, Samuel Haitz, Martina Mächler, Phia Seidler, Stella and Lena Maria Thüring

Event on facebook here.