February 1 – March 3 2019, Skånes konstförening
Opening: Friday, February 1, 6-9 pm.
 
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Anna Daučíková, Mi Kafchin, Mária Takács, Mima Simić and Marta Šušak, Ines Lukač, Teri Szűcs and Maja Pan, Valentina Iancu
 
Events:
Kinship
Friday, Feb 22, 6 pm: Mima Simic and Marta Šušak, lecture performance
Friday, Feb 22, 7.30 pm: Teri Szűcs and Maja Pan, lecture performance
Saturday, Feb 23, 6 pm: Film screening and talk with Mária Takács
 
Futures
Friday, March 1, 6 pm: Ines Lukač, lecture performance
In March (date to be announced): Valentina Iancu, talk
 
You’ve never seen the lonely me at all frames Central and Eastern European queer affects within a search for kinship. The exhibition and associated events showcase personal references to an absent history, to the way it affects and shapes our bodies, to finding ways of archiving and preserving specific experiences and kinship when confronting the loom of troubled times.
 
What existed before me in the place of my birth? I remember the face of one queer woman that comes from my early childhood. A butch person, I would call her or them, today. She was a friend of my mother’s and probably loved her in secret, unrequitedly. Hard to tell, in those days, but Claudia really did not look like the rest. Stood out in pantsuits, hair cut and slick, a beauty beyond what one could easily find in the streets in those days. She killed herself of too much drinking, my mother told me, one or two years after we left the large provincial town and moved to the capital city. She was left behind to roam alone the streets without my laughter.
 
What little history I can find in my bones and in the shape of my body is filled with the glow and the melodrama of loneliness, tinged with some Eastern European mystique. I stand alone, while not lonely, looking from within my narrative for the narratives of the women preceding me. Inventing some sort of herstory from the mechanics of the Cold War and the fleeting fashions of time. Something in my body is looking for references and similarities in all four cardinal points. My gaze is piercing, my body has passed through storms and changes, yet the only bit of history that I remember as being mine is that of Claudia’s smile.
 
You’ve never seen the lonely me at all is built from this: from a personal search which grows its own body, from a need to dwell in the presence of persons who evoke, symbolize or represent stories in which I identify references to mine: references of place, of flesh or of wording. Similarities of moving, and looking for the new in someone else’s structures. Being alone, still, inside the overarching narratives of someone else’s past.
 
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Silent is the work that links You’ve never seen the lonely me at all to the rest of the world: the exhibition begins by telling a story of women migrating, of their presence in the new places of their choice (or were they?), having mainstream history as a backdrop, becoming performative monuments in places of turmoil. Remembering, reenactment and body presence are the main topics behind Anna Daučíková’s 2011 video Portrait of a Woman with Institution – portrait of Muda Mathis and Sus Zvick with Zweisamkeit. Daučíková is looking with emotion at two fundamental figures for contemporary performance art, discussing the institution of togetherness. Mi Kafchin’s drawings and installation offer glimpses of a complex journey into transition, solitude, loosing and searching for one’s place, with twists of mysticism and irony.
 
In addition, the film Secret Lives, directed by Mária Takács from interviews conducted together with writer and activist Anna Borgos, will be available for viewing in the gallery space, referencing the effort to preserve history and kinship.
You’ve never seen the lonely me at all will also include lecture-performances by activists and artists Mima Simić and Marta Šušak, by researcher, transfeminist activist, and performative practitioner Ines Lukač, a video screening and talk with director Mária Takács, a lecture performance by writers and researchers Teri Szűcs and Maja Pan, a talk by curator and activist Valentina Iancu.
 
Curator: Simona Dumitriu
 
Separate events will follow for Kinship and Futures.
The poster image is a video frame from Anna Daučíková’s work.
The title of the exhibition derives from Without you I’m nothing by Placebo, 1998.
 
Skånes konstförening’s public program and exhibitions are presented with support from Region Skåne, Malmö Stad, Swedish Arts Council and ABF.