Conversation: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Lia Gangitano and Kris Grey
Thursday, March 23, 2017
6 to 8pm
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, English Breakfast, 2009. [Image Description: A collage on top of a piece of fuschia satin. The collage is a cut out of the Queen of England’s head, shoulders, and upper chest with her face comprised of cutouts of bacon slices, a tomato, beans, a fried egg, a mushroom, and two sausage links. At the bottom the title “ENGLISH BREAKFAST,” the artist’s signature, and “2/3 Edition” is written.]
Artist and trans-activist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, featured in The Intersectional Self, participated in a conversation with Lia Gangitano, founder of PARTICIPANT INC, a non-profit alternative space aimed to foster artistic experimentation, and Kris Grey, a gender-queer artist whose work employs strategies of activism, community building and education.
Bios
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE was born in Manchester, England in 1950. A member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970, Genesis founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions, as well as musical ventures Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Thee Majesty. Throughout h/er career, she worked and collaborated with Derek Jarman, Brion Gysin, Tony Conrad, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, and Monte Cazazza, among others.
In 1996, P-Orridge and partner Jackie “Lady Jaye” Breyer embarked on the Pandrogyne Project and became known collectively as BREYER P-ORRIDGE. They used collage and body modification techniques to explore the “re-union and re-solution of male and female to a perfecting hermaphroditic state” using Brion Gysin’s “cut-up” technique, both metaphorically and literally. In 2007, Lady Jaye tragically “dropped her body,” but BREYER P-ORRIDGE continues to practice as an interdimensional collaboration between the material and immaterial world. Their visual works have been exhibited in hundreds of exhibitions across the world, including a retrospective at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittburgh) and a solo show at the Rubin Museum of Art (New York).
P-Orridge’s archive is part of the permanent collection of the Tate Britain (UK). BREYER P-ORRIDGE is represented by INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.
In 2001, Lia Gangitano founded PARTICIPANT INC, a not-for-profit art space, presenting exhibitions by Virgil Marti, Charles Atlas, Kathe Burkhart, Michel Auder, Renée Green, and Greer Lankton, among others. As curator of Thread Waxing Space, NY, her exhibitions, screenings, and performances included Spectacular Optical (1998), Luther Price: Imitation of Life (1999), Børre Sæthre: Module for Mood (2000) and Sigalit Landau (2001). She is editor of Dead Flowers (2010) and the forthcoming anthology, The Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the ’90s. As associate curator, she co-curated Dress Codes (1993) and Boston School (1995) for The ICA, Boston, and edited New Histories (with Steven Nelson, 1997) and Boston School (1995). She has contributed to publications including Renée Green, Endless Dreams and Time-based Streams, Lovett/Codagnone, Whitney Biennial 2006-Day for Night, and 2012 Whitney Biennial on Charles Atlas. As curatorial advisor, her exhibitions at MoMA PS1 included Lutz Bacher, My Secret Life (2009). She currently teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NYU, and SVA. She is a Board Member of Primary Information and Dirty Looks; Advisory Board Member of the Outpost Cuts and Burns Residency Program and John Kelly Performance and recipient of a Skowhegan Governors’ Award for Outstanding Service to Artists and the inaugural White Columns/Shoot the Lobster Award.
Kris Grey is a New York City based gender-queer artist whose cultural work includes performance making, curatorial projects, writing, arts administration, and studio production. Grey’s latest commissioned work, Procession, will debut at Wave Hill in Outcasts: Women in the Wilderness opening April 7th, and their solo performance Body Dialectic, opens on April 28th at Warehouse 9 in Copenhagen, Denmark. In addition to their individual practice, Grey collaborates with Maya Ciarrocchi under the moniker Gender/Power. Gender/Power has been awarded a Baryshnikov Art Center residency, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency, a Franklin Furnace grant, and a MAP Fund Grant. Recent curatorial projects include Queer Objectivity at the University of Maryland, MIX NYC Experimental Film and Performance Festival, and the Queer Culture Performance and Lecture Series at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Grey's writing has been published in print and on the web for The Huffington Post and Original Plumbing. Their latest writing, Trans*feminism: fragmenting and re-reading the history of art through a trans* perspective, was published in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Grey earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University, and currently serves as the Deputy Director for Education and Visitor Experience at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.