AGNES QUESTIONMARK: THE UNBORN PATIENT
KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT announces a solo exhibition THE UNBORN PATIENT by the artist Agnes Questionmark, which will feature a full program of performances to take place during Gallery Weekend Berlin 2024.
April 27 - May 25, 2024
Examining the genetic and surgical processes that provide the groundwork for normativity, Questionmark’s practice unsettles these systems by forcing her body and her audiences into spaces where humanity fails to fully realize its normative demands Questionmark disrupts the biopolitical implications of transgender and transpecies bodies in a human-dominated world. She recently launched her first artist book with NERO Editions and is currently featured in the main program of the 60th Venice Biennale.
Prior to its birth, the patient transcends the biology of the carrier’s body, subordinated to the surveillance of the medical apparatus. The vital function of the host suddenly becomes as mechanical and artificial as a respirator, its sole function to ensure a safe, somatic environment for its unborn guest.
Robotic hands penetrate the human dermis, replacing the soon-to-be-extinct scalpel with a cold, steel, camera-faced tube. In the attempt to search for a completed image of human representation (both fetal iconography and genetic maps), we unwittingly submit ourselves to the surveilling medical eye. Only via the artifact – the medical apparatus – can we ultimately defy ourselves.
If artificiality has become the only condition through which we can access and assert our identities, the rules of biological determinism that once established the threshold for a normative survival are bound to collapse. Proclaimed before birth, biology erects social, political, and class roles that determine the life of the patient.
By deploying the same artificial practices already in place within the medical system, transgender bodies demystify the fragility of humanity, proving its inability to satisfy its own biological demands as well as its unfathomable dependence on the artifact.
Always in flux and never quite born, the trans-patient is by all means “the unborn patient”. Rather than staunchly race towards the devotion of a completed human image, accommodating all of its violent discriminations, we must work in tandem toward a deconstructed, liquid self. The subversive trans-body leaks out from the riveted grip of humankind.