GAMES

Game represents play and the structures of game-theory, but it is also representative of an object that is being targeted; hunted. In relation to child abuse and sexual abuse in general, it is about the physical and psychological crossing of boundaries, but there is also a collective social and cultural impact in this form of violation that is the subject of this exhibition.

Collectively or individually, sexual violation is framed within structures of power. Can power (-play) be used as a basis for dissecting the social grid that reveals the structures behind the individual “cases?”

The subject of incest and the taboo which surrounds it remains problematic from many angles, two of which are sex and race. Judith Butler attempts to define this with her question “How is incestuous heterosexuality constituted as the ostensibly natural and pre-artificial matrix for desire, and how is desire established as a heterosexual male prerogative?” This performance exhibition will be an investigation into the Oedipus complex and the disregard for the implied barrier in Father-Daughter child abuse. In order to examine this Father-Daughter relationship we must also examine the metaphor of gender. According to Peggy Phelan, performance resists metaphor where the body works metonymically and the performer disappears, representing a context. The gender metaphor is one that works within the boundaries of the phallus, reproducing a culture of one sex, one gender, and the presumed “homo-sexual.” The difference between the metonymy and the metaphor is both keen and present.

With reference to Africa, Ato Malinda will look at Fanonian psychoanalysis, which disregards a post-colonial or post-modern African female perspective. This performance will be situated from the perspective of an abused African female. Malinda will also apply Butler’s analysis of endogamy and incestuous practices within certain African tribes. The Concurrent discussions addressing the need for the Other in order to see the Self, and the universality of this victimhood that spans the discourse of gender and sexuality makes this project important in it’s connection to Europe.

Within the context of this exhibition, the curator Nancy Hoffmann introduces the word “game” as a central theme in an attempt to create some distance from the (severely emotional) facts and trys to visualize the social and psychological grid that lies behind it. From this vantage point, one can zoom-in and out on the different positions within the grid dissecting from the point of view of the violator and violated, but also from a position of the in-between points that create this grid.