Unruly Bodies

‘I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself.’ – My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix; Performing Transgender Rage. Susan Stryker. 1994.

Featuring thirteen women and non-binary artists, Unruly Bodies at Goldsmiths CCA presents artworks that explore the experience of embodiment today. The exhibition includes work that presents the body as monstrous, abject, grotesque and liminal. It asks why this kind of figuration appears in contemporary art, where rather than being a negative attribute, the unruly body is a site of resistance in which monstrosity is reclaimed as a subjectivity that disrupts normativity and contests power.

The exhibition includes works of Shadi Al-Atallah, Giulia Cenci, Miriam Cahn, Camille Henrot, Galli, Ebecho Muslimova, Frida Orupabo, Anna Perach, Paloma Proudfoot, and collectively Clémentine Bedos, Verity Coward, Assia Ghendir and Holly Hunter.

Artists in the exhibition draw on traditions of the grotesque, and abject, but shoot through these intersectional realities that expand and revise the terms. Historically held in a ‘low’ position, the unruly body is implicitly female, Black, crip, queer or other. The adoption of the aesthetic of the monster claims space for lived experiences that do not fit neatly into acceptable social conventions, and for those that are held as less-than-human. Through its liminality, and troubling of categories, the unruly body offers the possibility that the self is not fixed, but rather a complex web of interrelations in a constant state of flux.

Unruly Bodies is open at Goldsmiths CCA until 3rd September.