GARDEN OF EDEN
There’s a biblical paradise at the root of Western convention and normative constructions. The myth of the binary starts with Adam and Eve—the illusory contradiction between pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ defined by their expulsion from God’s playground. Creamcake’s “Garden of Eden” presents a curated selection of short films at Berlinische Galerie, as part of 3hd 2021: “Power Play”, suggesting an alternative to accepted reads on mainstream reality from a queer-feminist perspective. Running from October 6 to November 1, contributions orbit questions of identity formation, the body and its imprint politically, socially and culturally, and the expression of gender and sexuality.
Cristine Brache’s “Sequence 02 1” shows marginal women’s bodies and their reproduction as objects in circulation, across found footage of fetish porn and recollections of the gendered advice from her migrant grandfather. In complicating and questioning economic, political and sexual power relations as both oppressed and empowered, the artist questions the expectations of ‘otherness’ in the United States. Lu Yang’s “Delusional Crime and Punishment” invokes notions of hell across religions. A 3D-scanned head mounted on a stock CGI body conjectures that if humankind was created by a God, our propensity to sin is preordained, and our road to perdition inevitable. “In the Reflection of Ancient Tides” by Keioui Keijaun Thomas addresses blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Through movement and matter, she deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing; eroticized and marginalized representations of black bodies in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of ‘thing-ness’. The SPIT collaborative project explores the balance between play and consent, where the ambiguous soft spitting between the two strangers becomes a flirting game while Jacolby Satterwhite’s “Shrines” deconstructs hegemonic visual cultures from Christian iconography and Western art history and replaces them with a Black reigned world of pleasure.
