Curator and art historian Hana Janečková’s CWAH 2021-22 Fulbright Visiting Scholar lecture on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, Toxic Contingencies, examines the notion of alliance in multispecies arrangements as a future-orientated ecofeminist project. Exploring recent artworks which use the artist’s bodily waste in participative methods of working with the audience, Janečková traces the political potential of such embodied participation. Toxic Contingencies considers the notions of toxicity, trace and contamination in the work of artists Anicka Yi, Serina Tarkhanian and Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, who all use their own bodily fluids in their artistic processes. Explored through Astrida Neimanis’ hydrocommons, urine, saliva and vaginal secretion with DNA, toxins, hormones, fungi and mold are transported from bodies to bodies to more-than-human entities, where toxicity and contamination are inseparable from the transformative movements of fluids. Though such processes shows the shared ground between recent ecological and feminist projects, Janečková will also highlight how such methods of participative self-transformation and embodied healing in contemporary feminist artworks must be understood in the racialized and biopolitical contexts of the present.
Q&A discussion lead by Rebecca Mark, Director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership and a Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and the Institute for Women’s Leadership. Janečková’s scholarly research while in the US is supported by a Fulbright-Masaryk Award.
More info: https://cwah.rutgers.edu/event/toxic-contingencies-lecture-by-hana-janeckova/
Zoom Webinar: April 27, 2022 from 12:00-1:00pm EST | REGISTER HERE
Image: Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, Nothing Nowhere into Something Somewhere, urine with muscimol, sugar, gelatine, 2015
Courtesy of the Artists