Cruising for Meaning – Remarkable Meetings with Disgusting Men at W139
Some words of the exhibition text of Remarkable Meetings with Disgusting Men are redacted. Are the artists keeping something from us? Matti Sturt-Scobie visits the exhibition at W139 to unpack these absences: are they empty spaces to fill, or borders denying entry?
My eyes, once adjusted from mid-day to the imposed darkness, reveal red light rippling on fog. Depth obscured, the exhibition’s hall becomes a hell-mouth to an unknown place, a purgatory or condemned mineshaft. There’s an electrostatic anticipation: as in the locker room before prospecting the dance floor, this could be a club or an abandoned slaughterhouse.
This non-place houses W139’s latest exhibition Remarkable Meetings with Disgusting Men, a group show initiated by Turkish-born artist EMIRHAKIN. The goal of the show, the exhibition text states, is to reflect ‘on (self-)censorship as a highly tangible experience, ████ proposing ways for manoeuvring through fear. ██████ ████ █ ███, ████. In this exhibition, the strategies of oppressive regimes and their bodily implications are explored, subverted, ██████ and reappropriated through a careful spatial choreography’. This redaction is clever foreplay. Firstly, for its refusal to reveal what could be key, inflammatory details – as a government document petitioned through the “freedom of information” act. Secondly, for its enforcement of interpretation, an act that would usually emerge naturally in response to ambiguity. Here, it is set consciously as a boundary: a border, or law. I wonder, will this obscurity come at the price of intelligibility?
A few feet within the space, EMIRHAKIN’s If I go any further I will burn (2024) is laid on the floor before me. This work consists of an arrangement of blood-red fireworks of various dimensions and a spiked collar, that together form a red crescent moon and star: Turkey’s flag. To its right, at eye-level on the wall sits Sillage (2024), a long shelf of perfumes. The exhibition guide states that the artist collected these perfume bottles on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Whilst these religious nuances aren’t particularly stark, the works do amount to a strong preamble. Like an absurd poem, the perfume names read “Too Sexy, Macho Man, Hot 4 U, Absolute and Fire”, and I can imagine them fuelling oppressive, olfactory manspreading. The firecrackers are branded with scantily clad women, photoshopped onto nighttime cityscapes, thus projecting a hysterical masculinity – an urgency to annihilate or cum (pyrotechnically). Although the exhibition texts offer interesting context, they aren’t immediately traceable in the work. ‘The volatile nature of free expression’ for example, or the ‘conversations around sacrilege’ are hard for me to discern. Forty years since Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), I wonder who (in the West) would draw “sacrilege” from the work. In hindsight though, I do glean that the visual language of toxic masculinity is being used to defile what might be sacred to these men marketed to: a blasphemous monument. I now ponder, what other significance(s) will be lost on my W.A.S.P-ishness?
*Learning from the press text, I will perform my own small subversion. I’m experiencing firsthand this ‘tangible’ urgency for ‘(self-)censorship’. The sordid details of my own life, though they inform my readings, put my “professional” image at stake.*
Forward, and hidden in a booth of mint green curtains lies SPIKES/they are going to die anyway (2024), a collaboration between artist Jonas Lerch and ERMIRHAKIN. From the outside, the colour alludes to the medical, though the insides are black PVC, reminding me of many a ████ or ██████. An acrid amalgam of the clinical and the erotic saturates the length of the work. Within, a video is projected downward on a cushioned examination table. An older gentleman strips down from his remarkably tailored suit. He undoes the buttons of his pristine, chalk shirt, causing them to pop like cracking knuckles. All the while, he exhales aroused, tire-screech death-rattles. Once totally stripped, this old, rich perv archetype is ‘examined’ by hands gloved in blue latex, checking for hernias and genital abnormalities. With striking simplicity, the work tells a story of youth’s decay (see: twink death). It calls to mind the medicalisation of my own queerness – from ██ screenings, PrEP appointments, ██████, ████, ██████ examinations: the slew of discomforting experiences that have come to colour my sexuality, being the ████ urban ██ I am. Further, from my experience as an ████, I have intimate knowledge that desire doesn’t end at a certain age. These older men are often docile, jovial, warm, and suffering through endemic social isolation. Is the work stigmatising the man? Am I?
As I leave the installation, I hear a woman guffaw ‘are they about to pierce it?!’, averting her eyes and stepping out. This encounter wakes me, having just missed the cultural nuances of the earlier work. I think to all the experiences here that I can never truly grasp, no matter their palpability in a work of art – like her, who could never truly understand the works significance to me. I continue, with this thought in mind, before being deeply shaken by the sight of a row of pig ears hanging on the wall like murder trophies. Across and opposite, a whip hangs in a tight curl. Then, soothing and ominous, the red light’s source appears: a rolling veil of LED’s cutting though the smoke that hangs in the air. This is Topia (2024) by artist Zalán Szakács, whose light forms a body-scanning threshold, between here and the heart of the exhibition space.
Passing through reveals the expansiveness of W139’s main chamber, housing seven separate works. As you thread them together a moving visual poetry emerges. At first, subtle electric droning leaks out the ecclesial quiet, emerging from a motor that rotates a dense metal hoop in midair. In the space’s centre, a monolithic, industrial silver cube hangs from the rafters, looking as if it might bring the ceiling down. In the left corner, on perpendicular walls, sit two paintings. One, a dry-scrawled Arabic text on canvas titled allah yestor | الله يِستُر | may allah cover on what is bound to happen (2019) by Ghenwa Noiré. The other, titled Kids (Commemorating 15 July Coup Attempt) (2022) by Can Demren, which depicts a rabble of prepubescents holding Turkish flags, eyes joyfully leering out. Beyond the cube, with a stylish metallic continuity, stands a lonesome suitcase, brutal and still as the pitiless silver core.
To take all this in, I slide my back down the nearest wall to sit on the ground. To my surprise, there’s a life-like lamb sculpture beneath the monolith. And above, hung in red smoke: a monarch butterfly caught in stasis mid-flight. From the ground, a whole new perspective emerges. Alone, the starkness of these juxtapositions – fragility and immensity, brutality and innocence might come across as cliché. However, some aura I can only attribute to a subtlety in execution inoculates me from this. Each new thought, beginning a chain reaction of meanings. All of which in someway result in the lamb being crushed. Is this an alter to the queer immigrant experience – the burdens one bares when escaping a place so hostile to one’s very humanity? To avoid this demolition of vulnerability, do you move the suitcase? Recite the prayer of the painting?
Having digested this careful spatial choreography, I take myself upstairs to the final work I encounter: EDGING (VERBAL), (2023) another of EMIRHAKIN’s. It is on show in W139’s still very in-use bathroom. Its narration contemplates desire, dopamine and privacy, while flitting through crime-scene like screen grabs of bedrooms post masturbation. For me, this encounter drives home a disparity between the readings I drew and the exhibition’s stated goals. Earlier, I had used Google to translate the text on the work allah yestor and somehow that felt even more perverse and voyeuristic than here: forced to cruise and eavesdrop on melodic streams of ███. My translation was not on the artist’s terms. Even worse, I had weaponised technology to create my own dubious english abstraction of meaning. As such, I leave with new questions, of whether it is an artist’s obligation to tell us all their secrets, to create simulations of their life-world for us. Or, if this is a problematic expectation, a disgusting man, an ugly chimera of colonial extractionism and the branded-self. Obscurity here, rather than a cost, becomes a defiance of this demand: I should feel myself an outsider.
Remarkable Meetings with Disgusting Men
W139, Amsterdam
Trough 3 Nov 2024
More info
Matti Sturt-Scobie
is art critic
