Dziewczyństwo & COVEN Berlin present Bedtime, an exhibition and sleepover series at Municipal Gallery Arsenal, Poznań, Poland, 7 September – 7 October 2018.
The bed is a virtual monument to dreaming presents; a space for germinating ambivalent pleasures; shelter, battlefield and (dis)comfort zone all at once. This is the command center of girlhood, where all are stirred to feel the need for social disobedience. From 7th September to 7th October, we will organize a bedroom in Municipal Gallery Arsenal. We send messages from the world of girls to the world of liquid concrete.
The bed as a motif has appeared in art quite often, from the sweet, participatory BED-IN of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to Robert Rauschenberg’s aesthetic BED, the melancholic lair of Tracey Emin, the meaty space of interactions by Thomas Bo Nilsson, and finally, to The Sprawls, a series of events by COVEN Berlin and their guests.
During the month-long situation at Municipal Gallery Arsenal, two shiftless, shamelessly awoken queer collectives, Dziewczyństwo (‘Girlhood’ in English) and COVEN Berlin, will answer the following questions:
What are the new trends in young art? Geometrical patterns and expressive colors!; how to choose a medium for a figure; who won the competition “The Most Slender Female Painter under 15?”; shiny accessories – are they still in in post-internet aesthetics?; how to choose the right laptop for your complexion; a quiz for the most attractive code; what will boys come up with when the girl programs better than they do?; how to do a carnival performance; activist action: how to learn the art of origami.
Members of both collectives invite all who are willing to jump with them into a ten-foot bedspace. Aside from the opening, closing, and usual opening hours of the gallery, there will be three occasions to do so: the first will fall on 8th September (Saturday), when the hosts and guides of these nocturnal adventures will become Girls out of Girlhood. Plans for the late evening and early nighttime activities include oneiric hang outs, sentimental dress ups, rambunctious brawls, relaxing movie screenings, and collective diary-writing sessions. The space will be set up collectively, using objects small and large contributed by participants. The algorithm of sentiment will guide us to select the right objects. The accumulated surplus of time will be used to contemplate issues endemic to girlhood. Boredom will be used as a site of resistance against the productive normativity of the everyday art world. The shift in the institution’s usual opening hours will allow the participants to change the pace, slow down, relieve stress, relax…
Part two will take place between the 22nd and 23rd of September, and its instigators will be the Berlin magicians from the COVEN collective. Pioneers of queer romanticism will invite guests to take a walk on mental-metabolic routes with no visual safeguards to fall back on. This late summer evening will feature theatrically-inspired disses, nurturing self-care rituals, hair cuts, gossiping, make-up stories, Truth or Dare challenges, collective dreaming, karaoke, and even more karaoke. During these nocturnal sessions, we want to celebrate girlhood, which is more than a gender exclusive experience or abstract construction, for it is a mental and physical space for those who are neither women nor girls. It is a border space, an undefined area between types. All events are open to the public and all ages are welcome. We invite people of different experiences and skillsets, representing all possible sexes, and with various levels of able-bodiedness. The girlhood vibe knows no limits.
The last night (29th to 30th September) belongs to everyone and will be led by both groups: there will be summaries and steeplechases, culminations and boring narrations, intervals, stations and torn relations. The point is to create a world from the leftovers of the past, and to do this, everything comes in handy: bravo girl, bmx, drive-ins, applications, profanations, transparencies and dark nets. Remnants of worlds not yet dissolved by gastric juices, deposited like tectonic layers in abdominal geology; the market has a very efficient digestive system. It swallows everything, and even out of gold acrylic nails, it churns out crap. Human indigestion is bound up with character. In our search for the sources of girlhood, we turn to viscera, and like archaeologists on the trail of the ancient amphorae, we search for the generic features of our stratified personalities, what heteronormative optics and the reproductive function exclude from their spectrum; what escapes commodification, what stinks and lingers, and therefore retains independence. Girlhood is our frenetic dance on the ruins of cultural habits, a pastiche of class systems, and the ramifications of the necessities of life.
We revel to survive.
From official perspectives, girlhood is an ambivalent and sleepy state of mind, like trauma, like the stigma that appears when one takes on a role despised by patriarchal society, one who does not count, who disappears with age and experience in others who diminish this role. Girlhood is also a sphere of discomfort that may prove to be a place of solidarity. But girlhood is about love for all that is repressed, for what patrilineal geometry cuts out of view; it is the love of fringes, pleats and worn-down linings. It is out of these things that we sew our raft bed, by which we will reach well-known banks, leaving behind a whitewashed, depopulated, geriatric Europe. We exclude nothing and nobody – we are inclusive. Love knows no borders, accepts all viruses, for this is what is most humane and accessible, for everyone, without exception.
Girlhood is contagious, like love for another human being. Amen.
Schedule:
Vernissage: 7 September 2018, 18:00 – 22:00
Sleepover 1: 8 September 2018, 20:00 til late that night
Sleepover 2: 22 September 2018, 20:00 til noon the next day
Sleepover 3: 29 September 2018, 20:00 til noon the next day
Finnissage: 7 October 2018, 18:00-22:00
Summary of Sleepover Events:
8 September 2018
Entry until midnight
Hosted by Dziewczyństwo
Register: zofia.nierodzinska@arsenal.art.pl (persons under 16 only with the consent of their guardians)
boredom ♡ music ♪ performance✨sack + henna tattoos
24 hours after the official opening of the exhibition, the Girlhood’s celebration will begin. It will be accompanied by the dreamy synth sounds, personalized colorful punch and henna tattoos. There will be room for lying, doing nothing and for boredom. Painting nails, making stupid photos, performing serious personality tests and visual experiments with Bravo newsletters. Everything can happen and nothing at all. As part of this late evening and early night, a spontaneous, oneiric landscape will emerge, which we all will be a part of.
We invite you to bring a small object with you – a pass to the world at the borderline of reality and dream. A quotation / thought / drawing / photo / book – anything that contains an element of Girlhood in itself – however you understand it. The items brought by you will fill the bedroom designed by us in Galeria Arsenał, a truly personal experience of each and every one of us.
22 September 2018
Please arrive by 8pm. We will close the doors at 10pm.
Hosted by COVEN BERLIN
We welcome you to sleep the night with us — we have many bedscapes for you to slumber in. We’ll wake up together on the morning of the 23rd. Please bring your blanket, pyjamas, and toothbrush.
Register: zofia.nierodzinska@arsenal.art.pl (persons under 16 only with the consent of their guardians)
One the last night of summer, we invite you to the sleepover of your queer sweaty dreams, and favourite strange nightmares. For many of us, girlhood was a moment of idyllic sweetness and intimate possibility, while simultaneously stagnant, suffocating, terrifying, and disgusting. Over the course of a full evening (karaoke and makeovers), night (secrets and ghosts), and morning (bad breath and giggles), COVEN will take us through the thrill of touching someone’s hand, the power of a new haircut, the disgust of looking in the mirror, the melancholy of a love letter, and lots of karaoke.
29 September 2018
Please arrive by 8pm. We will close the doors at 10pm.
Hosted by COVEN BERLIN and Dziewczyńswto
We welcome you to sleep the night with us — we have many bedscapes for you to slumber in. We’ll wake up together on the morning of the 30th. Please bring your blanket, pyjamas, and toothbrush.
Register: zofia.nierodzinska@arsenal.art.pl (persons under 16 only with the consent of their guardians)
The last sleepover of girlhood: a moment to say goodbye to the childish rituals we don’t need, and to hold on tighter to the ones we still do. We will play truth or dare about our health insurance and tax forms, and we will burn photos of our bad memories with herbs. We see where we have grown bigger than the concept of ‘girl’, what parts of us are ‘women’, ‘boys’, or something else entirely.
For more information, please visit:
Text and curation by Zofia nierodzińska
Dziewczyństwo (EN: Girlhood) is an interactive art project created by Ula Lucińska, Paulina Piórkowska, Karolina Wojciechowska, Klaudia Kozińska and Agata Konarska in November 2016. The most important factor for Girlhood was the desire to create an open, non-exclusive strategy, which would be a pretext for the meetings that will characterize, from a broad perspective, femininity and girlishness. While organizing series of open call events, people were invited to cooperate and contribute with aesthetic and significance inputs about the girlhood theme. The events did not have the character of vernissages/exhibitions, but rather social meetings during which audience may discuss and exchange ideas no matter of the gender/social/professional and economical backgrounds. Girlhood is a relation based project that animate open discussions in the frame of art events instead of offering hierarchically ready answers.
