Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 19:00–21:00

Genitals on Trial

By Giegold & Weiß
Performance
Giegold & Weiß . Genitals on Trial © Julian Weigandt
With

Giegold & Weiß
and team

Moderation

Todd & Zoya.

Ticket

Free admission with an exhibition ticket for Queerness in Photography, regardless of the day’s validity.

Tickets may be available at the box office at C/O Berlin.

Genitals on Trial, a performative installation, discusses a forced debate about the right to privacy and who gets to enjoy it. Visitors can become part of the art piece by describing their genitals from an audio booth. A court sketch artist in the main performance space listens to these descriptions via headphones and simultaneously transforms the words into sketches. Another person takes notes. The visitors can follow both the drawing and the note-taking process live via large-scale projections.

Giegold and Weiß are interested in drawing as a language of its own, translation as a source of error, the emergence of something new through "error", the speechlessness that leads to imagelessness, and the creation of image/word archives. In addition to the debate on the right to privacy, the art piece counters the assumption that there are only two genders. The installation is Giegold & Weiß’s reaction to court decisions in England and Scotland, which punished young trans* folks for not having commented on their gender identity and the look or shape of their genitalia when meeting someone for a date.

Artist Statement
Installations are for the artists and trans* activists Alex Giegold and Tomka Weiß places of communication and thus of translation. Translated, for example, between spoken language and drawing; between people who are marginalized by public discourse and people who determine it. Statistics and metaphor. With lightness and room for humour, the most diverse perspectives on questions of identity and sexuality, marginalisation and normalisation are expressed. Giegold & Weiß's participatory exhibition formats are, in this sense, templates. It is a matter of recognising communication failures – acknowledging that there are realities that find no equivalent in other realities. This speechlessness that leads to imagelessness/non-existence is counteracted by the creation of image/word archives.
 

Part of the Utopia/Dystopia event series curated by Todd & Zoya. for C/O Berlin as part of the exhibition Queerness in Photography.

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