BACK GALLERY: GEORGIA BANKS (VIC) - LOADED

Opening - 5:30 PM - Wednesday, 7th December

Artist Talks - 6:00pm

Performance - 6:30pm

Running - 8th December - 24th December 2016

This exhibition takes two works that are loaded with meaning and heavy with time – VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants Genital Panic and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 – and puts them in conversation. For when facing each other, for each the other is counter and counterpart: they are connected, like two sides of coin.

Panic subverts the aggression in Action Pants: Genital Panic by directing it at the self. The nudity in Panic diverges significantly from EXPORT’s; legs sealed shut, inviolable, a perfect presentation of female passivity, any aggression or violence carefully contained. This violence then manifests in an act against the self. EXPORT pointed her gun into the faces of the audience. I am taking this loaded gun, and I am pointing it at myself. 

Rhythm, when entwined with this narrative, becomes an act of reclamation. Where fingers web the point of splitting wrenches open Panic’s welded thighs – and as blood begins to bloom there at the rupture fingers become thighs, and wet red slits in the skin offer an explicit wide apart perspective previously denied.