Closing reception: Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7 pm.
Feat. artists talk between Sunshine Wong and the artist. Free entry.
Kunstraum Richard Sorge presents "Nocturnes," an exhibition of night time photography by noted transsexual photographer and documentary filmmaker J.Jackie Baier.
The artist presents us with a deeply personal and unglamorized view of Berlin's sexual underground, moving through clubs, brothels, bars and streets. Baier, who moved to Berlin in 1993 and officially became a woman in 1997, documents in a non-voyeuristic way the lives of transsexual prostitutes, drag queens and other "misfits".
In the biggest monographic exhibition of the artists' work so far, all her main work groups are presented, amongst them Jackie Baier's most notorious one, House of Shame / Chantal All Night Long; a film/photo project spanning a period of ten years in the life of Chantal, club hostess and the most original transsexual icon of Berlin.
It comprises a veritable who's who of international GLTBQ performers, artists and Neo-Glam Lo-Fi Electro Sleaze-Rock musicians.
Berliner Fleisch, a group of photographs made between 2003 and 2009 intimately depicts the world of
transsexual prostitution of Berlin. Exhibited to critical acclaim at such locations as Berlin's NGBK and Copenhagen's Warehouse9, it provoked controversial reactions in the media.
Like the Impressionists, who also portrayed prostitutes often and sympathetically, Baier casually breaks all the rules of her
craft in these two series, sometimes achieving remarkably painterly images, whose extreme pointillistic graininess, haziness,
movement and sometimes timeless tableaux remind one of that artistic school as well.
The third and most recent work group, started in 2009, The Portrait Project,
extends Baier's interests in a broader political discourse.
Realized during a government-sponsored artistic residency in Copenhagen, the B&W works deal with migration as movement between
countries, classes and sexes. In an effort to to achieve its right of visual representation, Baier shows
the invisible face of sexual migration, freed of the taboos of society, sensationalist
journalism and artistic photography identified with the subject.
The photographer's reference to Jackie Curtis seems appropriate.
Baier's work has been recognized to be in the tradition of artists like Nan Golding, Jack Smith,
Kenneth Anger, and even Warhol himself, for the way she portrays (and in her case exemplifies) a
highly talented, unadapted, sexually anarchic subculture, one which is ultimately artistically and culturally highly influential.
Exhibition duration: 12.02 - 18.03.2010
Hours: Friday-Saturday, 2 - 6 pm, weekdays by appointment. Free entry. Special events t.b.a.
Finissage: Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7 pm. Feat. artists talk. Free entry.
Thursday, March 18, 7 pm, Kunstraum Richard Sorge hosts an artist talk within the exhibition between artist J.Jackie Baier and curator Sunshine Wong. Baier and Wong will discuss the artist's work process, biography, transgenderness, filmmaking and photography.
Sunshine Wong got her BA in art education at the University of Illinois, and a MA in Art in Context from the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Working as independent curator and art educator, she is not fixated on a certain technique, but philosophically works around themes like ambiguity and fleetingness. Wong's projects include the "Camp Museum", on (queer) aesthetic and performance, and the upcoming exhibition/festival "Tender Parodies" on imitation.
Homepage: www.muiji.com
Kunstraum Richard Sorge, Landsberger Allee 54, 10249 Berlin-Friedrichshain
Please RSVP at the Facebook event page
Press release: pdf, English
Bio: pdf, German
Artist info
