Saturday 23 August 2008

Venus Extravaganza at The Ballroom Walk

Venus Extravaganza at The Ballroom Walk
Is an exhibition by my friend Kristine Øksendal. I did a shoot with her some time ago, and some of the pictures are in this exhibition. I really look forward to see her work on the walls.. Good luck Kristine!



VENUS XTRAVAGANZA at The Ballroom Walk.
by Kristine Øksendal
In Gallery 21:25 from 4-7 sept 2008
Opens September 4th at 7 PM

When gender is perceived as sign it becomes difficult to grasp the essence of femininity: natural and constructed at the same time. The Ballroom Walk is a series of black and white photographs, where models pose to portray the ‘realness’ of feminine characters. Venus Xtravaganza is one of these characters.
The petit Latino transsexual Venus Xtravaganza dreams about life in the suburbs and a white wedding, as seen in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning (1991). The movie traces a community of transsexual and homosexual performers who Vogue their way through late 80s New York City, where different fractions battle each other in dance, dress and ‘realness’. Venus also appears in the book Bodies that Matter by Judith Butler, who also authored Gender Trouble and coined the term performative gender. Butler continues her study of gender and performativity in Bodies that Matter.

“I first began writing this book by trying to consider the materiality of the body only to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved me into other domains. I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought. Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundaries itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies “are”. I kept loosing track of the subject. I proved resistant to discipline, inevitably, I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter at hand.“
J. Butler, Bodies that Matter

In Upcoming Legendary, two young women trained in classical ballet perform to Indian Tablas for the first time. The girls move with grace and striking feminine effect to the hypnotic beat of the drums, visualizing how the the masquerade is rooted in their bodies. Matter and Schema* merges as they show off their physical strength and willpower to be somebody on the stage.
Venus Xtravaganza wanted to be a real woman, but without questioning the social construction of woman. She saw a female identity as an escape from poverty, racism and violence; instead it became her death. It’s easy to frown upon the female masquerade and resent women for submitting to this act, for being too much or too little drag. In this project I explore the feminine identity which seems to be split, some might say lost, between surface and core.
"She in fact may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the Other of the Other, a post-Woman embodied subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential metamorphosis."Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses

*: Materiality (Matter) never appears without Schema: form, shape, appearance, figure, dress, gesture, grammatical form etc. See Bodies that Matter.

Kristine Øksendal, August 2008.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wish that your photographer friend hadn't paid homage in name and photo to a person who only shared the name of the exhibition. The photographs are beautiful, but I do not believe or see the one christened as Venus, as having anything to do with the now deceased transgender performer/prostitute/dancer/and member of a Drag 'house' in the days of the Harlem Balls, where the dance of Vogue was born. I appreciate her even thinking of Venus, I just wish that maybe to honor her memory (she was found dead after 4 days in a hotel after all) that a trans-performer could have stepped into those shoes for the photo.