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Bonding Toxins
What does it mean to become toxic? To be marked as a toxin?
How does one live as intoxicated?
As theorist Mel Y. Chen argues, toxicity threatens, but it also beckons.
It inspires animacies as well as “queer-inanimate socialities.” Toxins
are markings and substances that travel, producing unpredictable bonds
along their way. How do we touch, ingest, project, and produce the
toxic? In how far is toxicity a shared condition that is nevertheless
unequally distributed? If you live in an intoxicating environment or
social order, would it be promising to become a toxin?
Bossing Images: Bonding Toxins stages an experimental meeting between an
audience, Mel Y. Chen, art educator and theorist Bernadett Settele, and
Renate Lorenz and Pauline Boudry’s film Toxic (2012). Inspired by the
film’s list of toxins, which range from heroin, androgel, and hydrolic
fracking to the filmic apparatus itself, we want to ask how toxins bond
and are bonded. What do the film’s provocative figures in masks and drag
tell us about toxic power relations and the socialities that live
within them? What kinds of queer bonds are produced within Chen’s
slightly different catalogue: lead paint on children’s toys, immigrant
workers and factory workers in the global south, and racialized,
queered, and disabled subjectivities? Does Settele’s collective practice
of hedonistic “luxory reading” offer strategies to create in/animate,
toxic alliances?
The event will take place in English, however participation is welcome
in all languages. When needed, we will try to translate contributions
communally.
Bossing Images: Bonding Toxins is the sixth event in the ongoing series
Bossing Images: The Power of Images, Queer Art, and Politics, curated by
Jess Dorrance and Antke Engel. Begun at the NGBK Berlin in 2012, the
series most recently traveled to Iaspis Stockholm with guests Wu Tsang,
Andrea Thal, and Tejal Shah’s Between the Waves (2012). Bossing Images
proposes “bossiness” as a framework through which to foreground the
power relations that shape the production, reception, and circulation of
art. These power relations are hierarchical, though never fully
stabilized, and are at times saturated with desire. Focusing on images
that engage with ambiguous genders, queer desires, freaky bodies, and
the puncturing of other intersecting normative imaginaries, Bossing
Images creates experimental scenarios through which to examine the
social field of images, artists, audiences, critics, and curators, as
well as questions of queer politics.
Bios:
Mel Y. Chen (Berkeley, California) is Associate Professor of Gender
& Women's Studies at U.C. Berkeley and an affiliate of the Center
for Race and Gender, the Science and Technology Studies Center, and the
Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences.
Mel's research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory,
animal studies, critical race theory, disability studies, and critical
linguistics. In the Fall of 2009, Mel convened "Species Spectacles," a
U.C. Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group focused on
animality, sexuality, and race. Mel's short film, Local Grown Corn
(2007), explores interweavings of immigration, childhood, illness and
friendship; it has played in both asian and queer film festivals.
Selected publications include Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering,
and Queer Affect (Duke UP, 2012) and “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate
Affections” (GLQ, 2011).
Bernadett Settele (Zürich) arbeitet an der Schnittstelle zwischen Kunst,
Pädagogik und dem Politischen. Sie lehrt, forscht zu und schreibt über
Kunsttheorie und Aspekte der Kunstvermittlung, über zeitgenössische und
Performance Kunst. Zahlreiche Kooperationen und Projekte mit
queer-feministischem und emanzipatorischem Hintergrund. Sie gründete
Luxuslesen im Les Complices*, Zurich mit. Bis 2006 war sie
Mitherausgeberin des poststrukturalistischen und queerfeministischen
Zeitschrift diskus. Artikel: Common Subjects. ‚Schöner Lesen’ als Luxus
der Kunstvermittlung (München, 2013); Dorothea Rust: Affektive Politiken
von Performance-Kunst zwischen Erinnerung und Ereignis (FKW Zeitschrift
für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur, Nr. 55, im Erscheinen).
Jess Dorrance (Montreal) is a writer, curator, and activist. She is
interested in the intersections between visual culture and feminist,
anti-racist, and queer politics. She organizes, with Dr. Antke Engel and
the Institute for Queer Theory Berlin, an ongoing series of events on
the power of images, queer art, and politics called Bossing Images, and
co-edited the book Bossing Images (NGBK, 2012). Jess curates short film
programs for activist and academic events, including “Oh Economy, Up
Yours!” (Berlin, 2010) and “Time-Queering Against the Grain: Utopic
Visions That Can’t Be Stopped” (Berlin, 2009), and is a member of
Montreal’s queer zine collective. She is currently working on her
Master’s project on queer visibility, representation, and trauma at
McGill University, Montreal.
Antke Engel (Berlin) is director of the Institute for Queer Theory in
Berlin, a site where academic debate meets up with political activism
and artistic/cultural practices (www.queer-institut.de). She received
her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University and works as independent
scholar in the fields of queer, feminist, and poststructuralist theory,
political philosophy, and visual cultural studies. She held visiting
professorships at Hamburg University (2003/2005) and at Vienna
University (2011), and a research fellowship at the Institute for
Cultural Inquiry (ICI-Berlin, 2007-2009). She has published numerous
essays and the two monographs: Wider die Eindeutigkeit (2002) and Bilder
von Sexualität und Ökonomie (2009).
Toxic (Berlin 2012, Super 16mm film /HD,
13 min) by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz.
Toxic (Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, 2012, Super 16mm / HD, 13 min), Filmstill, courtesy of the artists
