The group exhibition Sex Ecologies explores gender, sex, and sexuality in the context of ecology. The exhibition is founded in the belief that environmental and social justice go hand in hand. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the exhibition critiques understandings of nature, gender, sexuality, and race that attempt to objectify and naturalize them. For example, “laws against nature” used to criminalize queer sexuality, and in many places still do. These norms are justified through evolutionary narratives exclusively permitting heterosexual reproduction. Everything that does not fit this norm is considered unhealthy, polluted, or “degenerate.” These norms have proven detrimental to humans and to the thing we call nature alike.
Sex Ecologies presents newly commissioned works by nine artists made specifically for the exhibition! The works address surrogacy and male pregnancy, the connections between the hair of a Black girl as she is coming of age and the roots of trees, ecological BDSM with toxicity and microplastics, productive contamination in oysters, mythologies centered on the Greenlandic mother of the sea, the connectivity between a human body and the Nidelva river while láibmat (drifting in North Sámi language), an immersive microbial dancefloor, the trade routes from Cameroon to the banlieues of France of the safou fruit, or the shipworms eating away at Christopher Columbus’s ships as decolonial agents.
The nine artists participated in regular online meetings to workshop their artworks with the exhibition curators and with each other. The process was accompanied by an advisory board for cross-pollination composed of researchers from disciplines like gender studies, environmental humanities, communications, and Indigenous studies. This methodology is unusual for group exhibitions, where artists mostly work alone and do not meet until the opening. We are looking forward to show you what has become our most extensive group exhibition to date on 9 December!