EDITION III - INTRODUCTION

Edition III - Masquerade
The departure point for our current collaborative investigation is to explore an alternative conceptual framework of the masquerade. This thematic or subject can be easily read in the light of If I Can't Dance...'s continuing exploration, since its inception, of certain intellectual paradigms such as performativity, theatricality and feminism(s), all of which have emerged from the activity of If I Can't Dance... over the last three years. This exploration has, in effect, been produced by highly engaged artists in the form of experimental sketches, manifestations, exhibitions and enactments since 2005.

By jumping into the intractably spectacular topos of performance and theatre-based regimes, If I Can't Dance... through its unfolding production methodology probes, embraces and even sometimes collapses certain tenets of display and legibility employed in the visual arts, aiming to articulate a "politics of perception". (HT Lehmann)

Key to this practice is working with a select number of artists (in repertory) over a longer period and generating multiple spaces, contexts and possibilities for them to robustly engage and produce new work and insight on the emergent subject matter. As curators, we explore certain questions as openly and inquisitively as possible, providing the artists the maximum space and flexibility in order to generate their responses to our shared inquiry. The beginning of our current inquiry circles around the notion of the masquerade. Exploring its historical trajectories in psychoanalysis, feminism and performativity, we are particularly interested in Judith Butlers rethinking of Joan Riviere's text 'Womanliness As A Masquerade' (1929), stating that gender is a fantasy enacted by "corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations."

In other words, gender is an act, a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes, rather than a core aspect of an essential identity. Recent writing of Giorgio Agamben, entitled 'Notes on Gesture' (1993), forms a second point of departure. According to Agamben, entiteled "an age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny and the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable".