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"Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon" New Museum, New York

27/9/2017-21/01/2018

 
<http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/trigger-gender-as-a-tool-and-as-a
-weapon>
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/trigger-gender-as-a-tool-and-as-a-
weapon

Part of the 40th Anniversary Exhibitions of New Museum 

It investigates gender's place in contemporary art and culture at a moment
of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features an
intergenerational group of artists who explore gender beyond the binary to
usher in more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity.

The New Museum has been committed to urgent ideas since its inception,
devoting many exhibitions and programs over the years to issues of
representation with regard to gender and sexuality: "Extended Sensibilities"
(1982), "Difference" (1984-85), "HOMO VIDEO" (1986-87), and "Bad Girls"
(1994) are just four notable examples. Following in this tradition,
"Trigger" extends the conversation around identity, considering how even a
fluid conception of gender is marked by ongoing negotiations of power and
cannot be understood outside its complex intersections with race, class,
sexuality, and disability. The exhibition's title, "Trigger," takes into
account that word's range of meanings, variously problematic and potent; the
term evokes both traumatic recall and mechanisms that, set into motion, are
capable of igniting radical change.

Two points of my commentary:

First, feminism is entirely absent from the discussion and promotion of this
show in spite of the mention of key feminist shows above - which indicate
feminism is now implicit in this discourse, but not cutting edge.

 

Two: majority of artists are born in the 1980s. Is this why?

 

Katy Deepwell, 

Editor of n.paradoxa