AGNES QUESTIONMARK
OB/GYN
KÖNIG GALERIE x STXDYOZ
STXDYOZ, MILAN, ITALY
15 DECEMBER 2023 – 4 FEBRUARY 2024
PUBLIC OPENING
14 DECEMBER 2023 | 6 PM
KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present the solo exhibition OB/GYN by Agnes Questionmark. OB/GYN refers to medical practices and professions related to pregnancy, birth, labour, or genitalia, usually performed by a doctor or a technician. Hormones regulate the speed and quality of those processes of cellular growth, both in human and animal, gauging their value, either socially or economically, based on speed, production, and efficiency. Biological events determine individual’s identities, shaping their subjectivity and locating them in their geopolitics. Through incessant artificial reproductions, organ transplant, genetic experiments, surgical operations as well as synthetic drugs, this “biological order” can be subverted, transformed, and reshaped, with destructive consequences. Trans bodies, whether transspecies, transhuman or transgender, return the transformative agency to the individual, hinging its physical morphology with the artefact. Artificiality is the means through which one can assert its identity, at the looming cost of entrenching its survivability with the medical, economical, and political system
© Portrait by Sage Yodit
OB/GYN is an operation that defies the limits of gender identities, boundaries of human speciation, and the interrelation with the non-human world. The installation questions the morphological and conventional rules of a normative society dictated by a constant process of artificial transformations, self-surgeries, and body manipulations; a deterritorialization of the body in its “original” and “natural” form. The power relations of doctor-patient, science-nature, and human-machine, are subverted with a queerezation of the body which has turned into itself into its own experiment: pathologized, hospitalized, and mechanised.
Performance by Agnes Questionmark at the opening at STXDYOZ © Image by Lorenzo Villa
The gallery is transformed into a scientific laboratory: a place of transitivity, reflection, and self-birthing; between silicone, resin, and metal sculptures, as well as two video screens projecting the internal movements of a transpatient and its surgical instruments. The sterile and patriarchal hands of the doctor are liquified into a cybernetic set of autonomous tentacles.
In scientific terms, “teratology” is the study of abnormalities and bodily malformations either assigned at birth or acquired later due to pathological issues. In a sci-fi realm, “teratology” is the figuration of monsters, fairies, and mythological creatures that squirm away from humans, entering a nonhuman collective imagination. Science and culture hurt and nurture each other in a constant exchange. The oscillation between what is real and what is fiction gives birth to a violent hierarchical categorisation of species, race, gender, and ethnicities based on features that geolocate the body in its bio-politics. The “other” as an abject and as a monster defines trans-identities into a violent neglecting and discriminatory taxonomic process. If we are able to become doctor and patient, and therefore subvert the control that health systems are predominantly asserting over our bodies, promoting a normative reproduction and a biological gender identification, can we then evolve into undefinable beings?
For an appointment, please contact valeria@koeniggalerie.com
