Museum as Hub:
Carlos Motta
We Who Feel Differently
Opens at New Museum on May 16
Two-day Symposium, May 4 & 5, to Kick off Thursday Night Programs Organized by Motta
New Museum
235 Bowery
www.newmuseum.org
“We Who Feel Differently”
May 16–September 9, 2012
Exhibition on view in the Fifth Floor Museum as Hub space
“Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” is a multipart project—featuring an exhibition, a two-day symposium, and Thursday night events—that explores the idea of sexual and gender “difference” after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics. The project seeks to propose a queer “We” that values difference over sameness and that clears ground for greater personal freedoms in our present and future. Conceived as a platform to engage issues of contemporary queer culture, the exhibition for the Museum as Hub at the New Museum features a series of new sculptures and prints. Furthermore, a video installation, based on fifty interviews with an international and intergenerational group of LGBTIQQ academics, activists, artists, politicians, researchers, and radicals, situates current discussions of equality within the frameworks of citizenship and democracy. The project draws from Motta’s evolving database documentary www.wewhofeeldifferently.info that addresses the history and development of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning movements, proposing difference as a position for alliance-building, solidarity, and self-determination.
We Who Feel Differently: A Symposium
May 4–5, 2012
New Museum Theater
8 USD New Museum Members, 12 USD General Public
Leading up to the exhibition, “We Who Feel Differently: A Symposium” will investigate what is at stake and what is made possible by embracing difference as a queer strategy within contemporary art, politics, and society. The two-day symposium was conceived by performance artist and scholar Raegan Truax and artist Carlos Motta, and will be moderated by Ann Pellegrini, Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Symposium participants include: Julian Carter, Associate Professor of Critical Studies at California College of the Arts; Mathias Danbolt, editor of Trikster – Nordic Queer Journal; Dr. Tiger Howard Devore, intersex activist and certified sex therapist; Reina Gossett, community organizer; E. Patrick Johnson, Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies, Northwestern University; Heather Love, author of Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History; José Esteban Muñoz, author of Cruising Utopia: The Politics and Performance of Queer Futurity; Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad, trans activist, sexologist, and professor, University of Agder, Norway; and Emily Roysdon, artist. A performance by Malik Gaines will close Friday’s program. Please click here for the full schedule.
We Who Feel Differently: Thursday Night Programs
Fifth Floor, Museum as Hub
Free
During the run of the exhibition, Motta invites local queer artists, activists, and academics to hold public events on select Thursday evenings in the Museum as Hub. Events include a conversation about transgender issues in contemporary art, a lecture on queer and feminist theologies, a workshop on HIV/AIDS activism today, a “cruising” walk through downtown Manhattan, a discussion about queer responses to gay inclusion in the military, and a collective reading of queer texts.
May 31: Todd Shalom and Juan Betancurth: Sketchy Walk
June 7: Jeannine Tang and Reina Gossett: Love Revolution, Not State Collusion
June 21: Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars
July 5: QUEEROCRACY: 30 Years In, 30 Years Out: AIDS Activism Today
July 12: Jared Gilbert: Liberation Theologies for Secular Society
July 19: Carlos Motta and friends: Collective Reading
“Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” is curated by Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs.
About Carlos Motta
Carlos Motta is a multidisciplinary artist whose work draws upon political history in an attempt to create counter narratives that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities. Motta’s work has been presented at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, P.S.1, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Museu de Serralves, Porto, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, among others. He was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2008 and received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. Motta is part of the faculty at Parsons the New School for Design, New York, and Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.
About Museum as Hub
The Museum as Hub is a laboratory for art and ideas that supports activities and experimentation; explores artistic, curatorial, and institutional practice; and serves as an important resource for the public to learn about contemporary art from around the world. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the fifth-floor New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events.
Support
The presentation of this exhibition is made possible through a partnership with the Embassy of Colombia, Washington DC, the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, and the Office of Contemporary Art Norway. Museum as Hub is made possible through the generous support of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
Support is also provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David and Hermine Heller.
