Sexhibition Art

I got invited to a sexhibition last weekend. Yes, it’s an exhibition around the topic of sex. Before you imagined anything like a back-alley thing and dark dingy room, no, it wasn't anything like that. Nothing scandalous other than of course, the obvious. Allow me to walk you through it.

The exhibition began rather cute and playful – with objects of an apple, a stem of cherries, and a couple of others including a manacle each photographed on top of a spot of green grass. Then, all of them were photographed together in another shot titled, Forbidden Fruits.

Moving on to the next room, the exhibition started to get more daring. The main focus being a sculpture of a woman, naked, in a non-erotic way, painted in two striking colours with a rectangular iron-cast ‘helmet’ that reminded you of something of a medieval torturing device covering her whole head. On the shelf, a variety of genital paraphernalia meant to be used as a cork-stopper were on display. All items were available for purchase.

The third and final room contained those with the heaviest messages – mostly artworks of paintings and pictures that were hanged on each of the four walls in a brightly lit high-ceilinged room. In the middle of the room was a worn, antique classroom-desk. On top of it was a boxy, menacing, villainous ‘action figure’ with his genital hanging out. To the left and right in front of him were two tiny figures of school girls in their uniform. The message of this exhibit was as clear as day.

Being someone from the technical world, I struggle to understand arts if they are not in the form of words or movies. Thus initially, when a friend asked, “How was it?” I simply answered, “I think it’s mild...?” Which slightly shook her, so I added, “Maybe because I have not yet learned how to understand arts in this format.”  Which was true, at least until later on during the night.

You see, I had the approach all wrong in the first place. Perhaps ‘wrong’ would be rather too strong, let me rephrase that to ‘I did not approach the whole thing the way it was meant to be’.

So I tried approaching it in another way by inviting the curator to explain three of the paintings that caught my attention.

One of them was a painting that was akin to that of the Gemini symbol – of two women in a symmetrical pose connected to one another at the points of their heads and feet, with an equally symmetrical background of a triangle. This painting was titled, Self Love. It signified something familiar – duality, balance, connection – the soothing effect of symmetrical things.

Another was a painting of a woman’s body, with only a third of her body was in the frame, sitting on a floor, right hand in the air with strings tied to her fingers and at the other end of each of these strings were what I could make out to be, dangling eyeballs. Empty eye-sockets of seemingly what used to be the original places of these eyeballs were painted in the foreground. The curator helped to explain (and I paraphrased) that this painting depicted the artist’s feeling of being observed, objectified by the prying eyes of family members, relatives, and society, criticizing her in whatever she did growing up. As she matured, she managed to regain control by pricking those eyes out and having them hanging or controlled in her hand between her fingers. The familiar, taking back your empowerment from people who have too much opinions on us was not lost on me here. We all must have at some point of our lives wanted to gouge someone’s eyes out of their sockets, haven’t we? (Ladies, you’re with me on this.)

The third and final painting he explained was a seemingly semi-soft-male who was naked from his torso to the hips with an XOXO’  marking to the right of his navel. This painting was depicting a real-life sexual abuse victim and the marking was his traumatised view around the subject of intimacy post-abuse.

“OK,” I thought, that was one level deeper. These explanations definitely helped in filling up the narrative void in my head.

The photographs at the back though were another series of sexual traumas. A collage of men and women with their facial identities exposed in a dark, red and yellow fluorescent lit room. I grappled with creating a simple narrative from these collages of photographs. Are they all victims? Easy to assume this. Could any one of them be a perpetrator? Possibly. A repented one or not. It disturbed me that there was not a single flow of narrative that I can settle with that could fit into these series of photographs. I left it hanging with open-ending possibilities and moved on.

Soon after that, I started talking to another patron, an Aussie woman in her 60s. We touched on the exhibition though eventually our conversation veered into politics. I never liked talking about politics. It bored me to death. But recent political developments roused uneasiness from within me, I find myself having the need to talk about it, while still not liking it. We spoke about how things are like locally, how things used to be like abroad and how they evolved. Eventually I reached a point of exasperation and blurted out my question around this topic to her with visibly more emotions than I would normally do, to a stranger on top of that. That took her quite a-back momentarily before offering her opinions on it. We eventually wrapped up our conversations with some takeaway points from one another and each agreed that our conversation was probably the best outcome each of us got from this exhibition.

But that was it, actually. This art format is supposed to make you feel’.  While I was busy in the mind trying to create believable narratives from processing the artists’ point of view of the traumas and taboos around the subject of sex, a cocktail of emotions were brewing within me. The real faces in the picture collages at the back stirred something unpleasant in me. My brain was cracking, struggling to pin-point to at least a reason behind those faces that were triggering this steely taste in my mouth. But that was it. It wasn't about them in the picture at all, I didn't know them and that was why I couldn't make out a single narrative from these seemingly random shots to me. It was simply that the series captured precisely what I feel instead - about the current political development in the country, the worries that even my own mother who wouldn't necessarily be affected by it couldn't help from wondering out loud, the question that came out with a visible exasperating emotions to it - are we edging closer to an Islamic extreme state? How do we separate them then?

Earlier in the second room I overheard the artist explaining the sculpture of the woman with the iron cast helmet – according to him, it was supposed to show what a man would do in his mind if he didn’t like the woman he was being with, by tuning out her face – in this case, represented by the cast iron rectangular helmet on the sculpture’s head. The sexual act however, still went on regardless. Apparently, that is how a man is able to separate negative feelings be it dislike, hatred, or disgust, from the sexual act itself.

I felt myself feeling disgusted, which was expected and somewhat offended - which came off a bit of a surprise. Though I am currently not in a romantic relationship to psycho myself with, I couldn’t help but noticed the strong emotions that were triggered  – disgust, and a sense of defensiveness spewing words in my head against ‘this man’ but in defending who exactly...? I left the question hanging in the mind.

The sexhibit stayed in my consciousness ‘till the next day. While the painting of the symmetrical female figures spoke to me, apparently, the triggers I felt from the sculpture spoke to me in much more depth – the offensiveness, the defensiveness. Why? I don't have any significant other to make me feel this way and yet, they're there, these feelings. I fell asleep way after the World Cup Final concluded, too distracted in my effort to find the explanations to these strange response I had.

As I am not the type to multitask, my Monday morning work routine suffered from this continuous restlessness in the mind. Thankfully, the answer came to me eventually. I tuned in and understood that I was feeling offensive and defensive because there are parts of me that I have not sufficiently loved, or perhaps, there are parts of me that I hate. Instead of that of a man's, it was me who was looking at myself in that sculpture. There are moments when I refused to recognize myself while I go on about life. Call it fear of success or impostor syndrome or introversion or my Myers-Briggs personality type, whatever it may be in my effort to explain it from a scientific point of view, truth is, while the Geminid painting spoke to my ego, I am in fact spiritually closer to the sculpture of the woman in the worned medieval iron-cast helmet instead. And that is truly the matter to be addressed here.

What a revelation. A heady revelation.

That’s my take on this art format – it's not supposed to be viewed objectively, like engineers attending to cases that needed problem solving. Instead, you should turn all of that off and tune in, it is supposed to make you feel something, and from here you dig your issues out, especially when the feelings came on sudden and strong with no relations to anything else at all other than you and the art – what is it that you’re disgusted/uncomfortable/sad about yourself? So is with whatever that gives you joy. It's about being you, being human.

I supposed I did take quite a lot from this exhibition after all.