Vernissage: 2nd September, 2020 7 -10 PM

Exhibition duration: 2nd September - 3rd October, 2020

What is sex?

As a follow up to 2018s launching topic “what is porn?”, the core question of this year’s Porn Film Festival Vienna’s theoretical confrontation aims to stimulate societal debate and celebrate porn’s true diversity as an opposition to mainstream-oriented monotony of heteronormative male gaze. How can queer/feminist porn unfold its subversive and creative potential? Pornography can be sex-positive, safe, lustful, political and diverse.

In collaboration with Porn Film Festival Vienna, Improper Walls aims to open up a dialogue between artworks/artists and the public to question and reflect contemporary connotations of various concepts such as sex, sexuality, porn, gender, plesure, fantasy, reality and the discrepancy between spectatorship and experience. This 4-weeks long collaboration project includes discussions, artist talks and performances, as well as an exhibition that presents artworks that deal with this pornographic conundrum.

To deconstruct the ideas, images and rules about sex that we learnt, we need to look more closely on “What are we looking for when we are looking at porn?”
During the exhibition, artists explore how society shapes our desires and constructs sex as a mechanical act with defined beginning and end, transforming sexuality into a product that can be sold.
Is there still a pleasure when this passive state is interrupted and the observer is the one exposed? And while we may seek images over a real person for some illusion of safety, can porn be actually used as a tool to protect our identities against the oppressive regime?
Creating avatars through emerging media allows new possibilities for political intervention and addressing gender issues within a society whose language still does not recognise non-binary spectrum. This dissociation through virtual and augmented reality questions the traditional narration of human experience of closeness, but on the other side allows for other true fantasies, like hybridisation of human and non-human, whether organic or mechanical, to come to front.
Different ideas of body transformation can then lead us back to reinterpret again not only the concept of masculinity vs femininity but any other fantasies projected on us from the outside world.

Participating Artists:

ꜰᴜʟʟ ᴘʀᴏɢʀᴀᴍ

02.09.2020 : Vernissage

18.09.2020 - 19:00

Kamran Behrouz// Screening : Phenomenology of the third body

“Breathe’ is the name of my Motion Capture avatar —aesthetically related to the concept of “body without organs”—designed as part of my PhD research entitled ‘cosmopolitics of the body’. This research deals with the performativity of queer/trans/nonbinary bodies in exile, diaspora and refugee camps.

The performance lecture Phenomenology of the Third Body reflects on the creation of this avatar as part of this research. It poses several philosophical and psychoanalytical questions in relation to the performative role of VR and MoCap avatars in queer-feminist activism and art today.

The main part of this research deals with the notion of Untranslatability: for instance, the lack of sufficiently precise words to address transgender or queer people in Persian language. (...)" Kamran Behrouz

FACEBOOK EVENT

23.09.2020 - 19:30 & 20:30

Laura Stoll // Performance: Paraphilia

"What do we want, what do we desire, what do we allow ourselves to fantasize about? The border between socially acceptable and pathologic is blurry and constantly changing. In times of crisis, either monogamy or masturbation are the most nearby options. And where do we go from here?

Join for some strange questions and lubricious stories. This performance is part of the ongoing project Questionnaire Series. Drawing on a background in medicine, the performances use standardized psychological and medical questionnaires to reflect on personal topics that are subject to scientific – and societal - standardization."

Marko Markovic // Performance: Minimal

By tying to do as less as possible, with minimal gestures Marko Markovic creates a physical relationship between audience arousing tactile, visual and sound communication. The performance aims to share experiences about human closeness and/or distance in physical and emotional states of mind.

FACEBOOK EVENT

30.09.2020 - 19:00

Nora Scherer // Performance: There are certain rules

While working as a stripper, nora noticed that the private lap dances they give to visitors often follow a strict choreography and dramaturgy. During a regular shift they and their colleagues were confronted with the same lines and questions throughout the night so they started to collect them over time and incorporated them into this interactive performance.

Alexandru Cosarca // Performance: Online-Offline (Cancelled)

In the performantive piece ᴏɴʟɪɴᴇ/ᴏꜰꜰʟɪɴᴇ Alexandru Cosarca deals with the consumption of gay porn movies, dissecting the titles and decontextualizing them.

FACEBOOK EVENT

03.10.2020 - 15:00

Philosophy Unbound // Lecture: How to artistically portray bodily intimacy? How to transfer feel, touch and closeness into different media?

In this panel talk, we invite selected guests and the audience to think together about the link between embodiment and artistic creation. How can sexuality, mostly considered a matter of feel, be transferred into an audio/visual medium? Is it purely a matter of feel? What about the role imagination plays in sexuality? And how does our relation to this imagination change with the omnipresent audio-visual availability of pornographic images? Porn Film Festival Vienna offers us a possibility to think about the link between the epistemological question of how to generate meaning and the possibilities of artistic expression.

ɢᴜᴇꜱᴛꜱ:

-Gloria Dimmel (AT), hosts genital casting sessions
-Nora Scherer (DE), performance artist & sex worker
-Guus Diepenmaat (BEL), director, actor, visual artist
-Jaskaran Anand (AT/IND), director, performance-artist
-Valentina Duelli (AT), representing Porn Film Festival

ʜᴏꜱᴛ:
Flora Löffelmann (AT), feminist philosopher

Alice Moe // Performance : Radical softness

How we engage with bodies shows how we feel. How we think, we feel. How we think we SHOULD feel and interact.

Socialised by hierarchical structures we tend to dissociate from our own bodies to meet each other in this space of lost desires and projected fantasies onto us. Irritated to fulfill needs we learned to serve, passing this onto other bodies over and over.
Those who expect, will only reflect. Those who enjoy, will not destroy. A performance about finding your very own pleasure, allowing and enjoying it and coming clean from old patterns of dictated lust & sexual caregiving.

FACEBOOK EVENT

Video: Markus Tozzer

Music : Dreamreality by Tony Renaissance