Nexaris Suite
Agnes Questionmark
Nexaris Suite
curated by Angel Moya Garcia
Tenuta Dello Scompiglio di Vorno (Capannori, Lucca, Italy)
Opening 23 November 2024 3.00 pm – 7.30 pm
24 November- 13 April 2025
From 24 November 2024 to 13 April 2025, Tenuta Dello Scompiglio presents Agnes Questionmark’s solo exhibition Nexaris Suite curated by Angel Moya Garcia.
Agnes Questionmark’s research envisages a society in transition that pushes beyond evolutionary limits, hoping for new forms of biologically and technologically hybridised and fluid humanity that reinvent their own body, rendering it malleable and reversible. The artist brings to the foreground a trans body (transspecies, transgender, transhuman) as a body that is often pathologised, mechanised and hospitalised, shedding light on the patriarchal biopolitics at stake in the fields of science and health.
The theoretical focus of her works is the reflection on a new form of humanity, able to emerge from a context where the environment and species are evolving and where human identity and morphology are preparing to diverge from the essential and unique traits that have characterised it so far. In this context, technology, human beings and nature are the threads of a tangled skein in which to remain entangled in order to try to give a new shape to the world around us. Starting from the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Helen Hester and Paul B. Preciado, the Nexaris Suite project conceptualises and visualises a scenario in which new forms of resistance to surveillance and control become the manifestation of an ongoing mutation. It is no longer, or not only, a question of reacting to being surveilled and punished, but rather of refusing to be surveilled and controlled, surveilled and dominated, surveilled and subjugated.
The title of the exhibition refers to a hybrid and automated surgical room in which two of the most popular techniques in the medical field intersect to produce the highest quality images for a perfect diagnosis. Combining the imagination of magnetic resonance imaging and mobile X-ray scanning, this experimental complex forces patients to undergo a rapid neural network of quantum physics during a surgical operation. Completely unaware of the mechanisation of the room, patients lie locked on a table where they alternate from one device to another. A complete image of their organs, tissues or any other organic component appears in detail within minutes, revealing its entire structure. The image is subsequently examined by the doctor, who is then able to detect any form of symptomatic signs and thus impose his dominant gaze. Reduced to micro-data and displayed on a computer, the body can now be controlled by the doctor in all its intrinsic parts and analysed from any angle. In the wake of the control exercised by the condemnation of being visible, the human body at this point becomes manipulated by the hands of the doctor and by his acquiescence with the artificial eye.
From this perspective, if visibility is the instrument through which the medical gaze exercises its power, the eyes could become the only means of freeing the patient’s body from the device’s surveilling grip. By returning the gaze to its scrutinizer, by restoring self-consciousness through awareness of their own intentionality, the eyes acquire the ability to see and therefore to reaffirm their own dominant gaze on the scrutinising object or subject, subverting the surveillance of the medical gaze. Thus, the dialectical power relationship between dominant and dominated, which constitutes the fundamental role of the doctor-patient equation, could be reversed through the constitution of the eyes as a sort of mirror threshold, as uncrossable boundaries that allow reality to be observed, preventing it from being manipulated, controlled and regulated.
The artist however questions what happens when the eyes themselves, emblem of this revolution, become the object of the surgical intervention, the site of the confrontation between observer and observed, dominant and dominated, surveiller and surveilled. The three-channel video installation and the environmental installation shown in the exhibition give a representation of the eyes as symbolic windows onto the world, in different declinations and perspectives, and point out the scientific control exercised over bodies. The invitation is to be able to read present and future by waving between reality, imagination, utopia and dystopia in order to build other possible worlds.
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Bio
Agnes Questionmark (Rome, Italy, 1995) is an artist working between performance, sculpture, video and installation. Her artistic work examines the boundaries of the self through genetic experiments, surgery and artificial reproduction processes in which identity becomes unstable. Forcing her body and her audience into spaces where humanity fails to assert its normative demands, Questionmark disrupts the biopolitical implications of transgender and transspecies bodies in a human-dominated world. Her recent performances include CHM13hTERT (2023), in the public train station of SpazioSERRA in Milan and TRANSGENESIS (2021), presented by The Orange Garden and Harlesden High Street in London. Her work has been exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Malta Biennal, Valletta; König Galerie, Berlin; and the 14th Gwangju Biennal. In 2024 she was selected as a finalist for the 5th Mario Merz Prize, the Darmo Art Prize and the Stromboli Prize. In 2022, she was selected as a finalist in the CIRCA ART X DAZED Class of 2022. In 2019 she was selected to participate in the Midwater Residency in collaboration with Studio Forlane on the island of Poros, Greece. In the same year, the artist exhibited in the ancient city of Cosa, Ansedonia, for the first chapter of HYPERMAREMMA. In 2017 she received the ‘Lorenzo Il Magnifico’ award at the Florence Biennale in the Performance Art category. Her writings have been published in NERO Edition with which she recently published her first book ‘QuestionGen(0.00022ml)’ presented at the ICA in Milan
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Info
Opening: 23 November 2024 (3pm-7.30pm) free admission
Ticket also includes entry to the permanent installations
Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday, 2pm-6pm, or by appointment: € 5,00
Info and reservations
SPE ticket office
Via di Vorno, 67 Vorno, Capannori (Lucca, Italy). +39 (0)583 971125 biglietteria@delloscompiglio.org
Ufficio Stampa UC STUDIO – press@ucstudio.it
Chiara Ciucci Giuliani chiara@ucstudio.it – mob +39 392 9173661 / Roberta Pucci roberta@ucstudio.it – mob +39 340 8174090
