Appropriating the title of a gender studies course at the University of Leeds, Contested Bodies is a group exhibition that brings together the work of 43 artists from across the gender spectrum who interrogate and celebrate the performativity of gender, namely their own. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography and video, this exhibition is also about the philosophy of two UK-based private collections that examine the social construction of gender as all of the displayed artworks in this exhibition were acquired over the last twelve years by the Marcelle Joseph and GIRLPOWER Collections.
Aligned with the work of American queer theorist Judith Butler, the artworks in this exhibition as well as the featured collections see ‘gender’ as a cultural fiction of sorts with no fixed, coherent or natural characteristics. In the world created by this exhibition, there is no normative gender binary of male/female or heterosexual/homosexual, no hierarchy that privileges the heterosexual matrix for conceptualising gender and desire, and no fixed, primary or innate identities. The works in this exhibition attempt to transgress, subvert and disrupt society’s norms that police gender and determine what qualifies as “human” and the “livable”. Like Butler’s text Gender Trouble (1989), the purpose of this exhibition is to insist upon society’s legitimation of bodies and bodily expressions that have been ‘regarded as false, unreal and unintelligible’.
Contested Bodies fractures and intersects discourses, from feminist theory to lesbian and gay studies and from postcolonial theory to queer theory, criss-crosses the lines of identification and desire, and attempts to eliminate gender, sexual and racial difference all together in order to recognise every person’s humanity, not just those ‘universal’ bodies that Aristotle considered the ‘One’ (i.e., white straight males). Anybody who has felt the pain of being forced to operate from the periphery due to their gender, race or class is someone and part of the One as One cannot be divided. In this exhibition, previously marginalised voices are sounding their clarion calls for subjectivity, cultural legitimacy and political viability.
The full list of artists includes: Ad Minoliti, Agnes Questionmark, Alberta Whittle, Alexi Marshall, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Anna Perach, Amber Pinkerton, Athena Papadopoulos, Boris Camaca, Caroline Wong, Coco Crampton, Devlin Shea, Eileen Cooper, Gray Wielebinski, Jakob Lena Knebl, Jala Wahid, Jesse Darling, Jesse Makinson, Jonathan Baldock, Juliana Huxtable, Kira Freije, Larry Achiampong, Leo Costelloe, Lindsey Mendick, Lisa-Marie Harris, Martine Gutierrez, Neil Haas, Nel Aerts, Paloma Proudfoot, Paul Kindersley, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Penny Goring, Rebecca Ackroyd, Richard Malone, Rithika Pandey, Rose Nestler, Saelia Aparicio, Sam Keelan, Sandra Lane, Sin Wai Kin, Sola Olulode, Tenant of Culture, Zadie Xa and Zayn Qahtani.
