Anne Cummings (Felicity Mason), The Love Habit: The Sexual Confessions of an Older Woman, 1978.

Danh Vo, Swimming Boys, Vung Tau 1967, Installation detail Good Life, 2007, Courtesy the artist and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin.

Akram Zaatari, Red Chewing Gum, 2000, film still, 10 minutes.

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975,video still, 6:09 min, b&w, sound.

Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry, Normal Work (2007), DVD still,

Kunstverein München
Galeriestraße 4
+ 49-(0)89-221 152
München
Oh Girl, It’s a Boy!
October 20-November 25, 2007

Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! plays with the title from the 1994 in Kunstverein München presented exhibition Oh Boy, It’s a Girl! which in this time was kind of a pathfinder to the debate of gender-politics upcoming in the 1990s in modern art. Its credit was the exemplary showing of historic feminism and its tradition in the art of the 50ies and 60ies as well as the import of actual Anglo-American artistic gender-theories and accordingly artistic practices, that were practically un-known in Germany in this time.

Oh Boy, It's a Girl! expanded the feministic frame of the critics on societal gender-hierarchies and –representation to a general perspective on the performative „nature“ of sexualised identities and social norms. So the focus not only was on the feminisms in art, but also on a feminism without women (Leo Bersani), which in the exhibition was expressed in gender-travesties, gay politics and the deconstruction of normative structures of desires.

Nearly 15 years later Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! brings up this theme again to show it under new perspectives and in front of a changed social background, which requires a complete rethinking of the past debates about "gender politics“ and "gender studies.“

So in Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! now in the foreground are questions such as: "Has the successful fight about acceptance and integration displaced the worth of difference?“ "Are there at all any aberrances left, if today they are omnipresent as just marketing tools and lifestyle-economies?“ "What is associated now with the item of 'queerness'?“

Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! searches with awareness for the play with all these partly, though very differing poles of the debate. But where are any differences, if the point-of-view which forced them and in which they were lived, itself is dissolved completely in the context of social mainstream? In the middle of this voltage of a never-ending discussion Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! gives its own answers and provokes new questions.

Artists include: Dahn Vo, Henrik Olesen, Ellsworth Kelly, Brion Gyson, William S. Burroughs, Kaucyila Brooke, John Cage, Charles Henry Ford, Zoe Leonard, Homotopia, Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry, Akram Zateri, Richard Hawkins, Tom Burr, Cerith Wyn Evans, Forrest Bess, Stephen Prina, Stephen Willats, pablo internacional magazine, Clit, Basso, Straight to Hell.

Curators of the exhibition are Stefan Kalmár, Daniel Pies and Henrik Olesen.

Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry, Normal Work (2007), DVD still,

Tom Burr (*1963, New Haven, Conneticut, Lives and works in New York), Installation detail.