AGNES QUESTIONMARK
CYBER-TERATOLOGY OPERATION

GIARDINO DELLE VERGINI ALL' ARSENALE, VENICE, ITALY
20 APRIL – 24 NOVEMBER 2024

Agnes Questionmark is included in the main program of this year’s Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere”, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Questionmark uses performance, installation, and sculpture, to bring viewers on a journey toward their roots, questioning their genesis in the process, while presenting uncertain future possibilities of their becoming.
Portrait of Agnes Questionmark © Image by KÖNIG GALERIE

Agnes Questionmark is an artist working across performance, sculpture, video, and installation. CYBER-TERATOLOGY OPERATION foregrounds a trans body (transspecies, transgender, or transhuman) inside an operating room where everyone is under surveillance. While the audience watches its internal movements, the subject's eye is also a monitoring screen, as self and apparatus become one. Questionmark's work addresses the transgender body as one that is often pathologized, mechanized, and hospitalized, illuminating the patriarchal biopolitics at play in science and healthcare. The installation problematizes notions of perceived or expected artificiality for trans bodies by normative society and celebrates the emancipatory potential of a body-in-transformation that defies taxonomy through its own reclaimed process of becoming. It raises questions about the insistence on coupling gender with reproduction that still lingers today and wages a war on the scientific control exerted over bodies undergoing their own processes of deterritorialization.

© Image Menhir Studios

CYBER-TERATOLOGY OPERATION oscillates between reality, fantasy, and more-than-human worlds, gestating futures and new neurons rendered possible if we dream and fuse otherwise.

© Image Menhir Studios

Artwork conceived and produced thanks to the programme Biennale College Arte 2023-24, La Biennale di Venezia. 

FEATURED ARTIST

AGNES QUESTIONMARK
Agnes Questionmark (Rome, Italy, 1995) is an artist working across performance, sculpture, video, and installation. Questionmark’s practice examines the self’s boundaries through genetic experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes whereby identity becomes unsettled. By forcing her body and her audiences into spaces where humanity fails to assert its normative demands, Questionmark disrupts the biopolitical implications of transgender and transpecies bodies in a human-dominated world. Recent long-durational performances include CHM13hTERT (2023), presented in a public train station at SpazioSERRA, Milan, and TRAN...
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