Curator: Valentina Iancu

Artists: Mihaela Cîmpeanu, Roberta Curcă, Katja Lee Eliad, Yishay Garbasz, Sasha Ichim, Adelina Ivan, Alexandra Ivanciu, Anastasia Jurescu,

Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Elana Katz, Virginia Lupu, Ileana Pascalau, Aris Tureac, Smaranda Ursuleanu, Oana Paula Vainer

The research project lay me down across the lines is a curatorial exercise that aims at suspending gravity in our cultural system of norms. The resulting mindset opens up the possibility for the female gaze [1] to turn inward and formulate its own narratives. Based on the intersectionality of our social conditionings, the feminist exhibition lay me down across the lines brings together a series of narratives from outside the logic of hetero-patriarchy, placed in a register of personal subjectivity, of personal history or observation, abstracted both poetically and politically. The curiosity cabinet of thoughts ordered in rooms of their own [2] is built around a phrase I encountered in a zine titled Radical Softness as a Boundless Form of Resistance. Radical softness is a queer concept formulated by Be Oakley, creator of an editorial micro-initiative focusing on searching queer subjectivities: GenderFail. Its theoretical activity essentially complements that of lay me down across the lines. “Radical softness is something that doesn’t always get voiced or enacted; it is an internal feeling that drives how we carry ourselves in the world.” [3] Be Oakley sought to create a language for making visible an attitude that is completely invisible: the silent daily battles with social norms. Radical softness is an attitude for coming into contact with the self that is constantly constrained to fit in. Often this relates to bodies whose difference is overtly expressed and represents an obstacle for advancing socially. [4] The norm sets the limit. The limit is the norm. Within this reality, the paradox of representation is that negation and affirmation have the same effect: invisible dividing walls become solid. In the game of limits, transgression’s role is “to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise.

Lay me down across the lines

Group Exhibition,
13 09 – 13 12 2019

Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being — affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time. But correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it. Perhaps it is simply an affirmation of division.” [5]

In the reality of an ethical world, suspending the limits is an exercise of vulnerability within an uncertainty that pulls one farther within oneself. Pushing the system of norms to its limits seeks to exacerbate the alienation of reality exhausted by the blockage that transgression reveals to us. Theoretical discussions on the nature of limits and transgression have exhausted the possibilities of conceiving a new, inclusive, and ultimately equitable system. lay me down across the lines is consumed in the alienated impossibility of transformation. The exhibition is not constrained by a linear narrative but is constructed as a networked perspective with multiple vanishing points. Translated by Rareș Grozea [1] See Jil Solloway’s talk on the female gaze: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnBvppooD9I [2] See Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”, 1929 (source: http://www.gutenberg.org/). [3] Be Oakley [Ed.], Radical Softness as a Boundless form of Resistance, with essays by Lora Mathis, Alexis Ruiseco-Lombera and Kimi Hanauer, 3rd edition, Risograph. [4] See Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2017. [5] Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 35-36.

For the full video, please contact me.