“What is the non-binary body. What is the non-binary jacket. What is the non-binary haircut. What should the nail bed look like. Like the calluses on your feet. Which shoe size should you have. Do you sit leaning forward a bit or leaning back slightly. Which hair color is non-binary. Which eye color. Which skin color. How much body fat is non-binary. Do the tips of the feet point towards the center or outwards? How does the cough sound.”1
Jay Ritchie’s solo exhibition Wandlung & Scherben [Transformation & Shards] examines social roles and identities in the binary gender system. In a society that consistently feels compelled to categorize bodies not only in terms of gender but also more generally, Ritchie’s photographic and sculptural works focus on the non-binary body and its resilience without negating its wounds.
In a personal and poetic manner, Ritchie demonstrates through their own transition how gender can be a journey and a process. However, by making individual experiences visible, the works in the exhibition do not only refer to queer realities. Wandlung & Scherben instead negotiates identity in general as a flowing continuum rather than a rigid construct. Gender is not understood as a fixed category but as a state that, like our entire being, can change and transform.
Identities are shaped through experiences, which influence and at times even restrict life. Negative experiences express themselves through traumatization, which can manifest itself in the body as posttraumatic stress disorder. Jay Ritchie speaks as an affected person about their own traumas, which are taken up in the artistic process and made visible. At the same time, Ritchie detaches them from their individual focus, instead understanding them as a collective phenomenon that needs to be addressed. Through this particular mode of thematization, Ritchie creates a space in flux that addresses feminist themes powerfully through its vulnerability, exploring topics like shame, guilt, and self-assertion, and thereby describe a political act.
Wandlung & Scherben opens an artistic-discursive space, becoming a plea to rethink and change social structures. The exhibition title indicates that the search for one’s own identity seldom comes to an end. At the same time, it becomes clear that personal development and healing trauma is never linear but is always characterized by interruptions and disruptions. Only by publicly negotiating individual and collective traumas, talking about them, and not remaining silent, can intergenerational cycles of violence be broken and a macrosocial transformation be made possible. Our bodies don’t owe anyone anything.
1 Irina Nekrasov/a: Welche Haarfarbe hat Geschlecht. In: etece buch (ed.), Realitäten. 30 Queere Stimmen. Berlin: etecee buch, 2022.
Artist Jay Ritchie (none; they/them) lives in Berlin. Their works include installations, photographs, video performances and text-based works and understand visibility as a productive and discursive power. Jay Ritchie graduated in 2022 as a master student of Prof. Tina Bara at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. Exhibitions include Deichtorhallen Hamburg as winner of gute aussichten – junge deutsche fotografie 2020/21 and the collaborative exhibition project UNCOVER at Westwerk Hamburg & Künstlerhaus Sootbörn
www.jay-ritchie.com
PROGRAM
Trans & Care
Reading by Max Appenroth
24.4.20024 // 19:00 (in German)
In medicine, psychology and care, trans people are marginalised. Gender diversity is often considered together with sexual diversity – but this obscures the lived experience of trans people. The volume “Trans & Care. Trans Personen zwischen Selbstsorge, Fürsorge und Versorgung” (2019, ed. Max Appenroth / María do Mar Castro Varela) is therefore the first to address not only the current situation of trans people in various care systems, but also the concept of “self-care”. It is intended to pave the way for options for action that lead to improved nursing, medical, therapeutic and social care for trans people.
Max Appenroth is a Cologne-based trans activist, author, public speaker and is about to complete his doctorate at the Institute of Public Health at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Max has made it his mission to educate people about the beauty of social diversity. With his own company “Diversity Factory”, he and his team offer counselling, training and coaching on the topic of diversity and social sustainability. Max also talks on social media on various platforms about the beautiful facets of diversity and the benefits of an in-depth examination of it. www.diversityfactory.com
firebugs
Sonic Reading with Nino Bulling & Bär Kittelmann
25.4.2024 // 19:00
In the form of text, images and sounds, Nino Bulling and Bär Kittelmann present the graphic novel firebugs (Nino Bulling, Edition Moderne / Colorama, 2022), a trans love story that combines the intimate experience of the body and sexuality with the major ecological challenges of our time.
Artist and author Nino Bulling works in and out of reality-based formats with an interest in the documentary qualities of comics. In 2022, they contributed to documenta fifteen with an exhibition, collaborative projects and the graphic novel firebugs (Edition Moderne / Colorama). www.ninobulling.net
