Pornotopia Revised - Art and Porn on the Intersection of Resistance and Subversion

with Anna Ehrenstein, House of Tupamaras, Sadie Lune and Fannie Sosa, hosted by Sarah Held and Sylvia Sadzinski

The online symposium Pornotopia Revised - Art and Porn on the Intersection of Resistance and Subversion aims to bring together international artists and performers in order to understand pornography as an artistic and activist tool to visualize social power structures, to question normalizations and as a feminist attempt to break them up. When does porn become art and when can porn or art with pornographic means become a self-empowering feminist practice? When do bodies become mediums of mediation and negotiation for queer feminist protests against the male gaze and its presumed inescapability?

For a long time, feminism and pornography were understood exclusively as contradictory. Since the 1990s, however, (queer) feminist artists, activists, and researchers have taken up the genre, questioning its socio-cultural influence as well as the production mechanisms of the multi-million dollar industry. According to their own maxims, they reinterpret pornography and appropriate the genre. In this way, niches continue to emerge offering space for practices of resistance and rebellion against traditional readings of binarily constructed genders, sexuality(ies) and heteronormative role models.

The purposeful and ludic use of sexuality within artistic practice is reflected in presentations and talks by Anna Ehrenstein, Sadie Lune and Fannie Sosa, as well as a workshop by Anna Ehrenstein and the House of Tupamaras.

The symposium acts as a prologue or teaser to the exhibition “pornotopia revised,” which will take place at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in spring 2022.

In order to receive the zoom link, please register here.

| Time Schedule & Contributions |

12:00 Welcome and Introduction by Sarah Held & Sylvia Sadzinski

12:15 Fannie Sosa: “Cosmic Ass” (Lecture, Q&A)

Fannie Sosasees pleasure as a radical form of resistance in an embodied Afro-diasporic evolutionary practice. In her video work »Cosmic Ass« (2015) Sosa defines twerking as an act of defiance against sexual repression. Sosa uses twerking to illustrate how its history is entangled with topics like rebellion, diaspora, feminism, and politics.

13:15 - 13:30 Break

13:30 Sadie Lune in conversation with Sarah Held & Sylvia Sadzinski

Sadie Lune discusses and describes her position as a sex worker, artist and activist in the context of sex (work) positivity in dialogue with curators Sarah Held and Sylvia Sadzinski. Insights are given into her many years of work in the field of (queer-feminist) pornography. They explore how feminist approaches to the body, porn and self-determination have developed. Is it possible to escape the male gaze and how can porn be used as a tool for resistance and subversion?

14:30 - 15:00 Break

15:00 Anna Ehrenstein: “Tupamaras Technophallus” (Lecture, Q&A)

For her series ''Tupamaras Technophallus” (since 2020) Anna Ehrenstein collaborated with the Bogota-based fashion, performance, and voguing collective House of Tupamaras to create multimedia works that propose a new onto-epistemological relationship to science and technology iconographies. They reflect topics such as embodied knowledge, materiality, gender fluidity, but also the potential dangers of data gaps. Ehrenstein will talk about the process and draw analogies on how this work cycle is linked to previos art works where notions of femme artificiality or femme authenticity to power structures are examined.

16:00 - 16:15 Break

16:15 - 18:15 House of Tupamaras & Anna Ehrenstein: “Critical Cam Girl Reading Group” (Workshop)

For the “Critical Cam Girl Reading Group” Anna Ehrenstein teamed up with “House of Tupamaras”. Ehrenstein also worked within the Collective for “Tupamaras Technophallus” , the work cycle shown at “Protozone”. The workshop has three parts: A start through collective reading of decolonial science, tech and post-humanist studies critique spiced up with femme empowerment poetics, second; encouraging the participator to develop it’s absolutely new posthuman alter ego and third (virtually tune) in “House of Tupamaras” to transform oral and written theory into embodied knowledge games and cam girl dances.

| Bios |

Anna Ehrenstein explores relations between human and object at the intersections of networked images, tech and migration. While her mother came from Albania to Germany on a working visa, her father left on rejected asylum and started anew in Tirana. This biographical peculiarity sparked her interest in the necropolitics of migration. Material culture, science and technology studies are the basis of looking at representation and platform capitalism through a queerfeminist, decolonial lens.

House of Tupamaras isan interdisciplinary collective dedicated to the practice, circulation, and management of the Ballroom and Voguing culture in Colombia. They generate safe meeting spaces for the free development of the body and gender. Taking elements from dance, performance and the visual arts, they develop scenic pieces that question the differences or similarities between contemporary art and the show. House of Tupamaras explores what is generally cataloged as "Mariconeo and Pluma", stigmatized and excluded gestures and movements in public places, that is why they are interested in nightlife and partying as a place of construction of knowledge and meeting between different groups.

Sadie Lune is an artist and creative professional who works across disciplines and with diverse collaborators. Sadie is also a sex worker and pleasure activist with a storied career in the sex industry spanning two decades and has won awards for her short films and performances, appeared in feature films and queer porn, exhibited explicit whore-positive artwork in squats and the SFMoMA, and shown her cervix internationally. She writes for magazines and anthologies on topics of sexuality, gender, intimacy, fertility, BDSM, feminist porn, queer parenthood and sex work.

Fannie Sosa is an afro-sudaka activist, artist, and pleasure scholar. Sosa creates mixed media knowledge packages that span performance, video installations, circular talks, extended workshops, using pleasure and its transmission as a radical act of resistance for an embodied afro-diasporic evolutionary praxis. They have been featured at the Tate Modern, le Centre Pompidou, Wiener Festwochen and Museo Reina Sofía, among others. Sosa currently lives and works between Europe and South-America.

The event is supported by Kunsthalle Exnergasse KEX and Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (IKL)