Kaucyila Brooke, Tom Burr, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Cerith Wyn Evans, Charles Henri Ford, Antonello Faretta/John Giorno, Brion Gysin, Richard Hawkins, Homotopia, Ray Johnson, Zoe Leonard, Simon Leung, Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry, Dorit Margreiter, Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen, Stephen Prina, Danh Vo, Jean-Michel Wicker, Stephen Willats, Akram Zaatari, basso, Clit, Dyke Action Machine, pablo internacional, Straight to Hell

Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! plays with the title of a former exhibition presented at Kunstverein München in 1994: Oh Boy, It's a Girl! This exhibition paved the way for a newly emerging debate on gender politics in contemporary art in Germany by amending the traditional frame of feminist criticism of social gender hierarchies and representations with a general perspective on the performative ‘nature’ of sexualized identities and social norms. Almost 15 years later, the exhibition Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! attempts to reconsider, question and re-evaluate the central aspects of the then underlying debates on ’gender politics’ in the face of a changing political present.

Central for the re-staging of these debates in Oh Girl, It's a Boy! is the conflict between the fight for recognition and integration on one hand, and the protection of ’identitary difference’ on the other. The exhibition attempts to polemicize and problematize between achievement and loss: How can difference be articulated, if the position from which it could be practised has long ago been incorporated into the social mainstream? In what way could such a position be re-imagined in the context of current conditions? What vocabularies of articulation could thus resist today’s omnipresent dynamics of integration as an expression of incommensurable desire?

Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! moves within the tension between opacity and transparency, refusal and mediation, the struggle for difference and the fight for recognition, in order understand and question the shifts and repositionings of contemporary gender politics.

Co-curated by Henrik Olesen.