It was a great pleasure to go to the opening of The Pleasures We Choose - the exhibition in the Pavilion of Finland at the Venice Biennale this year. Curated by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, it features artists Pia Lindmann, Vidhya Saumya and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, which as the associated publication says "‘weaves together the work of three artists whose practices are acutely informed by their embodied experiences of structural, environmental and social imbalances in the world’’. The pavilion aims to be transformed into a space ‘in which audiences are exposed to different “occupancies” - entangled relationships between people, buildings, objects and spaces - and are invited to re-adjust and (re-) consider how different bodies are expected to look and behave according to social norms’.
I was invited to the private view because I wrote something for The Pleasures We Choose publication entitled Disrupting the Gallery. This was a fantastic opportunity to work with such thoughtful and social committed curators - helping me think critically about the nature of “spectatorship” as a form of problematic embodiment; and how we might re-imagine artistic content, encounters with the work and the spaces of the gallery itself, by starting with non-normative bodies and minds.