Miraculous Thirst - how to get off in days of deprivation
Basic Space in association with the
Galway Arts Centre is delighted to present
Miraculous Thirst, how to get off in days of deprivation by
Emma Haugh and
Eimear Walshe, curated by Daniel Bermingham.
Miraculous Thirst, is a collaborative encounter between shared practices of
queer world making,
towards the blossoming of shameless queer desire (thirst). The works
perform a repositioning of public space and the private sphere in
relation to the non-reproductive pleasures of
getting off.
Analogue
sites of social sexual pleasure - public toilets/park
bushes/nightclubs/bars - are becoming sanitised under the forces of
rising rents and the intensification of human capital, transposed into a
digital non-place, rubbing up against a reproductive, domestic present,
what José Esteban Muñoz calls the “prison house... of the here and
now.” Where do we get off? Queer intimacy and desire are becoming
regulated actions, their manifestations monitored in both private and
public realms. Lives at the intersections of systems of oppression are
threatened on the streets, by lovers, in the bedroom and in the bushes.
How do we maintain spaces for shared sensual /sexual pleasure and care
when personal safety is at risk?
Gloria Anzaldúa claimed herself
to be the “Shadow Beast”, a shape-shifting queer body slithering in the
cruisy dark. Miraculous Thirst is a hissing ephemeral moment of queer
abundance and potentiality, a horizon in the midst of deprivation,
denial, trauma and violence. Through this generative exercise,
Miraculous Thirst seeks to activate a colloquialism of queer
reclamation, staking ownership to spaces and networks under queer
economies of care.
Please join us for an opening celebration and the performance of ‘
Sex in Public’ by Emma Haugh, at the Galway Arts Centre, 6 pm, Saturday, 5th May and for a reading by Eimear Walshe 1 pm, Sunday, 6th May.
Miraculous Thirst, how to get off in days of deprivation runs until Sunday, 6th June.
how to get off in days of deprivation is a query posed by Kathy Acker.
Eimear Walshe - Eimear presents new sculptural works including ‘
Triple Bed’, ‘
First Date’, ‘
Middle Spoon’, and ‘
The Third Person’,
a set of proposals for how one might thrive in the face of personal and
national sexual trauma. The works cast a side-eye at the coerciveness
of coupledom and sexual binarisms, and uses the vernaculars which
manifest these forces in furniture and grammar to create a new
narrative: an idle fantasy, an unholy union, a humdrum pornography
recounted by a Venus in Aquarius through objects, words, and diagrams.
Eimear
Walshe makes sculptures, writing and research with a focus on queer
theory and feminist epistemology. They are a two-time research fellow at
the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, where they will next initiate The
Department of Sexual Revolution Studies.
Eimear Walshe is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Emma Haugh - Emma presents interconnected new works ‘
Flags for Queer Cruising Sites’ and ‘
Clothes for Queer Cruisers’
performative, propositional objects, talismans for desire that offer a
shifting and connective queer iconography. The works raise questions
about the role of social space in shaping identities, the meaning of
communal space for marginalised peoples, and the significance of public
spaces for social visibility and safety. The works engage queers in
collective ephemeral acts of ritualised land and property reclamation
developing a shared imagination and re-appropriation of sexual utopias
that feed a transformative queer politics, for pleasure, for care, for
arsing about, for getting off.
To date ‘
Flags for Queer Cruising Sites’ and ‘
Clothes for Queer Cruisers’ have been embodied through collaborations with:
Line Skywalker Karlström -
http://lineskykarlstrom.blogspot.de
District, Berlin as part of 'Caring for Conflict'-
http://www.district-berlin.com/en/caring-for-conflict/
