“Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” is a multipart project that explores the idea of sexual and gender “difference” after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics. The exhibition draws from Motta’s database documentary wewhofeeldifferently.info that consists of a website, publication, online journal, and discursive events. Conceived as a platform to engage critical issues of contemporary queer culture, “We Who Feel Differently” features a video installation based on fifty interviews with LGBTIQQ academics, activists, artists, politicians, researchers, and radicals from Colombia, Norway, South Korea, and the United States, exploring notions of equality, difference, citizenship, and democracy. The interviews address the history and development of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning movements and experiences, proposing the notion of difference as a profound strategy for alliance building, solidarity, and self-determination.
We Who Feel Differently: A Symposium
New Museum, May 4–5, 2012
Leading up to the exhibition, the New Museum presents “We Who Feel Differently: A Symposium,” investigating what is at stake and what is made possible by embracing difference as a queer strategy within contemporary art, politics, and society. The two-day symposium, conceived by Raegan Truax-O’Gorman, scholar of Performance Studies, and artist Carlos Motta, will be moderated by Ann Pellegrini, director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Please click here for more information.
We Who Feel Differently: Thursday Night Programs
5th Floor - Museum as Hub
Free
During the run of the exhibition, Motta invites local queer artists, activists, and academics to hold public events on select Thursday evenings in the Museum as Hub. Events include a conversation about transgender issues in contemporary art, a lecture on queer and feminist theologies, a workshop on HIV/AIDS activism today, a “cruising” walk, a presentation of a book about queer responses to gay inclusion in the military, and a collective reading of queer texts, all of which address critical issues of contemporary queer culture in the United States.
May 31: “Todd Shalom and Juan Betancurth: Sketchy Walk”
June 7: “Jeannine Tang and Reina Gossett: Love Revolution, Not State Collusion”
June 21: “Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars”
July 5: “QUEEROCRACY: 30 Years In, 30 Years Out: AIDS Activism Today”
July 12: “Jared Gilbert: Liberation Theologies for Secular Society”
July 19: “Carlos Motta and friends: Collective Reading”
About Museum as Hub
The Museum as Hub is a laboratory for art and ideas that supports activities and experimentation; explores artistic, curatorial, and institutional practice; and serves as an important resource for the public to learn about contemporary art from around the world. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the fifth-floor New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events.
Profile
Carlos Motta is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws upon political history in an attempt to create counter narratives that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities. Motta’s work has been presented internationally at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; P.S.1, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá; Museu de Serralves, Porto; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; and Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, among others. He was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2008. Motta is part of the faculty at Parsons the New School for Design, New York, and Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, Annandale on Hudson.