TRANS SEXUAL EXPRESS
BilbaoArte. From January 8th to February 6th 1999. Bilbao.
Ana Laura Alaez, Manu Arregui, Txomin Badiola, Bene Bergado, Ion Mikel Euba, Miguel Angel Gaüeca, Ignacio Goitia, Esther Ibarrola, Madame Titania Ltd, Begoña Muñoz, Itziar Okariz, Lucia Onzain, Sergio Prego, Santi Saiz, Dora Salazar, Estibaliz Sadaba, Beatriz Silva, Eduardo Sourrouille, José Luis Vicario and Azucena Vieites.
In the '90's, body worship had became an obsession for the western world. Not in vain this idea covers the vast majority of problems arising in society's contemporaneous agenda. Sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, etc. are condensed in bodies and the contemplation and combination of these different categories form individual identity. In direct opposition to XIX century hypothesis, present-day social scientists have successfully demonstrated that these categories come about and are developed in the field of culture. As far as contemporary anthropology is concerned, for example, as Lourdes Méndez points out, bodies are "social products equipped with sense that carry out certain functions and social habits according to established techniques, rules and knowledge that affect them". Were sex, gender and sexuality consciously thought-out categories, then, in the words of Judith Butler, identity becomes a "performance" that takes place within a social context and making use of representative strategies in order to do so.
As everyone knows, art is the discipline that traditionally uses representation mechanisms as the raw materials for its products, but does so by revealing their manipulative nature. It should therefore come as no surprise for us to learn that, at this particular historical moment in time and in the light of the latest tendencies that have surfaced, new generations of artists have bowed before this passion for identity and unceasingly generate texts and works of plastic art that address thisidea about bodies.
Another of the points the labour of the Commissar has kept in mind was that of both sexes having equal representation, thus respecting the much referred to, but rarely exercised, equality of sexes. In fact, as has already been denounced from several fronts, enormous resistance to maintain quotas according to gender are still to be found in the world of art, a quota, on the other hand, that has posed no problems in its being fully complied with from either the point-of-view of female artists, or from the point-of-view of the quantity of women artists making up the world of art in Euskadi (The Basque Country).
"Trans Sexual Express", the title of the exhibition, toys with the idea of the movement. It endeavours to reflect the fact that "sex", "gender" and "sexuality" are categories that expand and include the subject's identity. At the same time, it recreates the conception of the vital experience and the formation of the person's identity as a continuous flow. In this fashion, the title seeks to cover all the different theories and social uses springing not only from the Academy, but also from social practice, revealing those mechanisms that make them up and demonstrating the scope of the catalogue illustrating the different possibilities for the construction of sex and sexual identities. This vision is in consonance with the conceptualisation of the idea of gender as "performance " and its aim is to reveal the interests that sustain sexual discrimination. In this particular sense, our intention is to reflect the difference that strives for equality. Welcome on board the train; enjoy the trip!
Xabier Arakistain. Exhibition curator.
CONFERENCES:
"The labyrinths of the body". Lourdes Méndez.
"Political ontology of modernity". Amelia Valcárcel.
"Gay and lesbian studies in Spain and the anglo-saxon world". Paul Julian Smith.
