Flesh Spaces
Flesh Spaces
Curator’s Note
In the 1990s, a group of Australian feminist artists called VNS Matrix claimed the term “Cyberfeminism” in their pursuit for the celebration of embodiment, gender, and the body in cyberspace. Challenging the rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s which emphasized the “data made flesh,” transcendence, and the disembodiment of the body popularized by cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Cyberfeminism vowed to interject the female body within these spaces to contest a male-focused technoculture. Through a series of Net.art, manifestos, and artistic interventions, they sought to theorize, recreate, and reclaim the internet and technologies as flesh spaces—spaces that emphasized the wet, fleshy, female body. In addition, taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s “The Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” (1985), they found within the cyborg, a symbol for the dismantling of binaries between the human and animal, human and machine, and the physical and non-physical. The cyborg figure became a political strategy for coalition rather than division which could subvert the command and control of the dominant white capitalist patriarchy.
Despite being a utopian view of cyberspace or the internet as a site of freedom from social constructs, Cyberfeminism was not without its challenges. Many theorists and critics have critiqued how the group was monolithic and was predominantly white and cisgender (Fernandez, Wilding, Wright, 2002; Wajcman, 2004). Today, the tools for critique by artists are more widespread with the advancement of and accessibility to technology as well as with the help of advocacy groups and collectives like Black Girls Code, Black Girl Tech, Deep Lab, and Women in Technology, among many others. Presently, we face a new and more inclusive technological landscape with much potential.
30 years after Cyberfeminism, today new modes of celebration of the body by artists working alongside digital technologies need to come to light. Flesh Spaces represents artists, especially those of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ groups, whose works challenge, disrupt, and dismantle the logic of the shiny, new, cool aesthetic popularized by male techno-culture and the “tech bros” of Silicon Valley. Employing a variety of techniques, such as video, GIFs, performance, or installation, they bring attention to different bodies and forms of embodiment in between digital spaces and RL places. These works continue the legacy of the Cyberfeminist movement, but simultaneously depart from them. By inviting multiple new perspectives, digital technologies are no longer tied to one dominant culture but instead offer new avenues for possibility, imagination, and renewal. It is through a coalition of multiplicities that we can rethink alternative futures for digital technologies.
–Constanza Salazar
Nassem Navab
Informed by her Iranian American identity, Interdisciplinary artist Nassem Navab critically engages
with a wide array of social issues, from the policing of women’s bodies to self-expression and
identity. She works in various mediums from 3D modeling, video, sound, and photography.
Romi (Ron) Morrison
Romi’s artistic making often turns towards othered practices within queer black feminist labors of love and survival. It is a refusal to strip the life from queer black feminism and relegate it to an academic argument.
Bev Yockelson
Beverly “Bev” Yockelson is a nonbinary trans gay artist who uses it/he pronouns. Bev is an artist and poet. Its body of work frequently revolves around themes such as trans bodies and body horror, technology and transhumanism, jewish identity and memory, or all of the above.
Estephania González
González explores the complexities of the question, where are you from? This question becomes the foundation for much of her work from which she creates new narratives that reflect upon and take into consideration a contemporary understanding of the human condition and her personal consciousness.
Stefani Byrd
Byrd’s work focuses on creating psychologically charged immersive media environments addressing topics such as digital feminism, gun violence, and how technology impacts empathy in digitally mediated spaces.
Hyun Ju Kim (ex-media)
Hyun Ju Kim’s computer interactive installations and performance projects deal with posthuman conditions in the techno-cultural society, exploring the notion of identities in such an environment with ubiquitous digital technologies.
Mohamed
Al-Bakeri
Al-Bakeri is an independent visual artist based in Cairo, Egypt. His work focuses on topics that go beyond our socio-cultural norms and seek narratives that challenge the existing molds. Through this work he attempts to transform the fixed binaries and showing more possibilities, as masculinity and gender politics is of great interest in his work.
Melissa Huang
Born in Chicago, IL, Melissa Huang’s surreal oil paintings, prints, and videos explore digitally constructed bodies and multiplicity of identity with a focus on glitch imagery.
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