Paulo Foundation Invitational exhibition
Exhibition Laboratory Project Room, Helsinki
Curated by Elis Hannikainen
this
exhibition
is definitely
not
about
dicks
The exhibition deals materially with the clash of an individual with the state sanctioned gender reassignment process. It shows all the data produced of the artist in gender identity research clinics and the acute psychiatric services in Turku. In the exhibition bureocratic and medical data encounter the reality of a bodily existence.
Vappu Jalonen: F43.22, performance; installation view, images Tamir Lederberg
Elis Hannikainen:
The Neutral Image
I will swim forever.
I will die for eternity.
I will learn to breathe water.
I will become the water.
If I cannot change my situation I will change myself.
In this act of magical transformation I recognize myself again.
I am groundless and boundless movement. I am a furious flow.
I am one with the darkness and the wet.
And I am enraged. ¹
After first reading Camille Auer’s previous work, an essay titled “Monument for the Excluded”, I returned to it several times. It is an essay that also documents an intervention to an institutional space, a clinic that provides public health services for transgender and nonbinary persons. In the essay, the clinic is described as a physical space, and through its practice. Which examinations take place there; who works there; how many returns are necessary for an access to treatment. Other things are addressed, too: pathologizations, dismissals and violent exclusions.
Last year, I had the possibility as a curator to invite an artist for the Paulo Foundation 2017 exhibition. I went to see graduate shows and watched works online, all the while having Camille’s work in mind. I was convinced by her approach without knowing what her future work would deal with. The future work, ”Antiphallic Dick”, is in many ways close to the essay but it also treats the subject differently, in a material way.
What does it mean to speak of institutions and the violence within them? Dean Spade notes that administrative systems, such as institutions of health care, appear to many as neutral or benign, approachable. But those systems create and distribute life chances and do it according to their own norms and categorizations, which has deadly consequences for some. ² To speak of violence is also to speak of policing and control. Speaking of violence means staining a neutral image that the institution would like to keep.
Email exchanges, question sheets and medical records are private documents that circulate between the clinic and the individual. In “Antiphallic Dick” they turn into material that shows how a medical institution deals with an individual lived experience. The work also brings the documents into a new proximity with a body. This proximity disrupts and complicates the documents, does something to their validity.
How the documents become readable here – at eye level, one after another, as a strange kind of serial – also reveals things about them. The institutional language appears emotionless, distorted and at times inaccessible. It has a syntax of its own. The subject is spoken of in third person, or is completely left out. (Was pretending to go to school. Has spoken to all family members.) In the reading, the language can reveal itself as inauthentic in describing an experience. At the same time, in the process of reading, it also always has the possibility of becoming ordinary and neutral language, normalized language.
In the face of this monotone and repetitive language, one is also expected to tell the same things again and again and to continue to “insist to exist”. ³ Or as Camille describes, one has to keep insisting on existing when the hormone clinic hands over a questionnaire, meant for cisgendered men that want children, about the use of anabolic steroids. The necessity and endlessness of insisting are tiring and wear one out. But insistence can be performed in a multitude of ways. In “Antiphallic Dick”, the body in itself is already an insistence.
¹ Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage
² Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
³ Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects