Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product
Moderna Museet, Index – Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator | Stockholm University, and other venues
Stockholm, Sweden
May 18–October 13, 2024

Frieze
Vaginal Davis Creates Spaces for Queer Kinship and Experimentation
Matthew Rana
June 5, 2024

Artforum
A Woman’s Work is Never Done
Vaginal Davis and Rick Owens
May 2024

Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product is the first major institutional solo exhibition of award-winning artist, acclaimed author and international blacktress Vaginal Davis. In her pioneering and incredibly diverse oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets racial justice and resistance meets joy. Magnificent Product is on view at Moderna Museet and partner institutions in Stockholm, including Accelerator, Stockholm University, Index – Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art, MDT (Moderna Dansteatern), Nationalmuseum, and Tensta Konsthall.

The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome; HAG – small, contemporary, haggard; and The Wicked Pavilion 
Moderna Museet
18 May–13 October 2024

At Moderna Museet, Vaginal Davis metabolizes her own history with three major installations. First, The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome, which holds four of Ms. Davis’s films from the 1980s and 1990s: That Fertile Feeling (1983), Cholita! (1995), The White to be Angry (1999), and The Last Club Sucker (1999). Together, they show Ms. Davis as a founding mother of Los Angeles’s punk “homocore” scene.

The second installation is HAG – small, contemporary, haggard. Initially conceived as Ms. Davis’s apartment gallery on 7850 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, California (1982–1989). “HAG” hosts numerous works by Ms. Davis: a suite of paintings of “women trapped in the bodies of women”; an installation of “lesbian domesticity wallpaper”; and two totemic sculptures made of bread, Dirty Mariah (Lower Mesopotamia 40 BC) and Timberlake, described by Ms. Davis as “Rapa Nui Moai monuments vs. the Venus of Willendorf.”

In the final room you are invited to step into The Wicked Pavilion, where, in the form of a library and a tween bedroom, Vaginal Davis brings together the icons, celebrated and forgotten, that populate her universe, through a dazzling installation of over 500 books, over forty paintings, and numerous handbag sculptures, not to mention a sampling of her blog avant-la-lettre Speaking From the Diaphragm: The Vaginal Davis Blog.

(https://www.modernamuseet.se/press/en/pressimages/vaginal-davis-magnificent-product/)

Installation views, The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product”. Photo: My Matson/Moderna Museet. © Vaginal Davis 2024.



Installation view, HAG – small, contemporary, haggard “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product”. Photo: My Matson/Moderna Museet. © Vaginal Davis 2024.





Installation views, The Wicked Pavilion “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product”. Photo: My Matson/Moderna Museet. © Vaginal Davis 2024.

Vaginal Davis: HOFPFISTEREI,

Index – Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art
17 May–1 September 2024

With the exhibition HOFPFISTEREI, Index, in close collaboration with Moderna Museet, highlights Vaginal Davis as a writer – presenting a library of text material produced between the 1980s and the present day. The body of work of performance artist, writer, and icon Vaginal Davis chronicles Black queer existence with absurd humor and cutting precision. Her practice comprises performance, text, painting, installation, fanzines and films. Ms. Davis shapeshifts with assurance while moving from scene to scene, changing position and mode of address, to ensure her audience is always uncomfortable; never allowed to grow complacent.

The title of the exhibition hints at one of Vaginal Davis’s key methodologies. Attracted to the word and its sound after noticing it on a number of shops in Germany – “Hofpfisterei” is the name of a German bakery chain – Ms. Davis takes it and appropriates it for another use and context. As the title of this exhibition, the word becomes an act of performative naming and a conceptual placeholder for a working space, a production and presentation site, a possibility of invention embracing joyful irreverence.

Vaginal Davis’s agile leaps between downtown nightlife, academy lectures and gallery settings are mirrored in her equally kaleidoscopic writing. The exhibition at Index features a multitude of genres – from poetry to long format journalism to falsified confessional literature and tabloid rag gossip columns.

The different formats hint at the various avenues of dissemination and circulation that Ms. Davis has employed over the decades: pamphlets handed out at club nights, fanzines distributed by mail, and community circulars paved the way for myriad digital iterations of self-publishing. In Speaking from the Diaphragm, Ms. Davis’s long-running online diary, conceived in the early days of the internet before the existence of blogging through pre-coded platforms, visitors are invited to scroll through decades of gossip, tell-alls, and caustic culture reviews in their original forms.

The diary entries continue a legacy from print media: throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, Ms. Davis wrote spirited chronicles and columns for LA Weekly, Glue Magazine, UR Chicago, Dutch and later Zoo Magazine, amongst others. With a distinct voice and the intimacy of a first-person narrative, these texts often gave an almost real-time account of the events covered. The exhibition also presents Vaginal Davis’s crucial Zine production. Davis created Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine while working her day job at the student counseling office at UCLA, using their xerox machine to copy fanzines. Typed on her 1920s typewriter and illustrated with polaroids, magazine cutouts, the work of photographer friends and images from an acquaintance who was the art director for a large porn publisher. The texts crawl with fabricated and repurposed words and phrases, and glossaries defining new additions to the “vag-vernacular” were a recurring feature in Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine.

Exploding not just literary but linguistic conventions, Vaginal Davis’s texts present a language that voices issues which cannot be expressed within the confines of customary vocabulary. A language that acknowledges and names the people and cultures which, in standard jargon, exist only as negations or inversions of their normative counterparts. In this way, Davis deconstructs simplistic binary oppositions, and challenges preordained ideas of supposedly given divisions. Dodie Bellamy, writing in Mousse Magazine in 2022, quotes that “Davis has repeatedly stated that she doesn’t fit in anywhere. . . . Language is one site where she reinscribes an unwelcoming cosmos, creating an alternate one in which she makes sense.”

Installation views, Vaginal Davis: HOFPFISTEREI, Index, The Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art.


Marrying old school glamor and urban grit, Ms. Davis’s productions interlace highbrow poetics with crude colloquialism and sexually explicit content. Her verbal takedowns of celebrities, authors and public figures honor ballroom culture’s custom of reading – delivering elaborately inventive insults and mockery; this in turn a continuing lineage building on Black vernacular traditions like “The Dozens”, a verbal game of tender trash talk, common in African American communities, where opponents trade increasingly harsh insults, usually directed at the opponent’s appearance of family members, until one of them gives up. Ms. Davis’s texts both assume a readership which is part of the community, familiar with its particularities, and teasingly dares the outsider to enter.

The exhibition invites visitors to enter into the library of Ms. Davis’s text archive as a site of research. Beginning in June, a summer course titled Text as an artistic medium will be held in situ within the framework and duration of Vaginal Davis: HOFPFISTEREI, with the participants gathering in the exhibition’s reference library amidst Ms. Davis’s multifarious writings. The course is led by Index in collaboration with The Royal Institute of Art, applying yet another institutional layer to the reading of Ms. Davis’s writing.

HOFPFISTEREI at Index presents an archive that is (a)live; growing, morphing and mutating, with fresh perspectives and new material generated throughout the exhibition, as invited artists and researchers interact with the material as part of the public programme. The design of the exhibition has been made in collaboration with the collective MYCKET, with a permanent duality between production and presentation in mind: a stage and a working site, a club and an office space, glamor and machinery.

This exhibition has been developed in collaboration with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as part of the exhibition Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product. The museum presents a major retrospective of Vaginal Davis’s work while, in parallel, Index is the locus for research on her text production. Vaginal Davis’s solo exhibition Magnificent Product is initiated by Moderna Museet and extends across several locations in Stockholm: Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Tensta konsthall and MDT (Moderna Dansteatern). Each institution highlights a different aspect of Vaginal Davis’s expansive practice.

(https://indexfoundation.se/exhibitions/vaginal-davis-hofpfisterei)

Vaginal Davis: Naked on my Ozgoad  or: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat 

Nationalmuseum

Once upon a time, in the far-eastern part of Los Angeles, a little girl was born. Her name was Vaginal. She was a child prodigy: she could read when she was two, soon learned to speak five languages including Assyrian, graced the stage of numerous elementary school theatres, enrolled in the local genius honours program, and, at the tender age of eight years, mounted her first exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library: a radical rethinking of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers in the United States, Vaginal named herself after Angela Davis—forever cementing her name in the annals of history: Vaginal Davis.

Only recently, archaeologist and artist Jonathan Berger uncovered Vaginal Davis’s installation Naked on my Ozgoad from the ruins of Ms. Davis’s former palace in Ramona Gardens, Los Angeles. In response, Ms. Davis spawned “Middle Sex”: her mesmerizing magnum opus, the queen of all zines, a 500-page book in which she collages text, found photos, and drawings with her personal eclectic archive of 30-plus-years, to, in her own words, “open the doors to realms and possibilities never before imagined in one supersized, precariously unhinged volume.” In the zine “Middle Sex,” Vaginal Davis orientates the mythos behind L. Frank Baum’s Fairyland of Oz and triggers something new and quirky from it. “Middle Sex” is the epicenter of a collection of sculptures, sound works, and hieroglyphic drawings on the walls of The Old Library at the Nationalmuseum.

Nearby, a selection of paintings by Vaginal Davis graces the turquoise walls of the 19th-century gallery. Ms. Davis’s paintings of “women trapped in the bodies of women” evoke a longer art history of icon painting, originating in the damp fortresses of 11th-century Byzantium and practiced to this day by Vaginal Davis on the idyllic Rote Insel in Berlin. The paintings also show the queer networks and friendships that exist in her practice, both factual and fictional, Biblical and Platonic, in time and over time. Such relationships are mirrored in the display opposite of Vaginal Davis’s paintings, which honors friendships between female and queer artists at the turn of the century. Which century? Come in and find out.

Credits

Vaginal Davis: Naked on my Ozgoad, by Vaginal Davis, in collaboration with Jonathan Berger. The exhibition is organized by Hendrik Folkerts (Curator of International Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet), in close collaboration with and Eva-Lena Bergström and Carina Rech (both Nationalmuseum).

With contributions from Richard Gabriel Gersch, Salome Gersch, Hands On Press, Kathleen Hanna, Daniel Hendrickson, Adam Horovitz, Ricardo Montez, Miss Joan Marie Moossy, Maria Norrman, Uzi Parnes, Susanne Sachsse, Angela Seo, Carmelita Tropicana, Ela Troyano.

(https://www.nationalmuseum.se/en/exhibitions/vaginal-davis)

Installation view, Vaginal Davis: Naked on my Ozgoad – or: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat. Uncredited photo from Nationalmuseum Stockholm.


Vaginal Davis, Drawings on a wall in the Old library. 2024. Photo: My Matson, Moderna Museet.


Vaginal Davis, Middle Sex. Bound book. 2024. Photo: My Matson, Moderna Museet.


Vaginal Davis, Proffesor Wogglebug. Photo: My Matson, Moderna Museet.


Vaginal Davis, Right: Mamba’s Daughter Fredi Washington 2017. Left: Susan Kohner - Imitation of Life, 2017.

CHEAP: Choose Mutation

Accelerator | Stockholm University
17 May–15 September 2024

Accelerator presents CHEAP: Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick. CHEAP is a Berlin-based art collective with the following long-time members: artist and performer Vaginal Davis, translator Daniel Hendrickson, actor and artist Susanne Sachsse and academic Marc Siegel.

CHEAP’s work materialises as performances, videos, festivals, concerts, talk shows, installations and radio programmes. In any format, their practice combines theory and pleasure, politics and whimsy, aesthetics and sex. The exhibition title is inspired by writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s article, “Learning from the Virus” (Artforum, June 2020). CHEAP says, “choose mutation. Don’t wait for it to choose you.”

Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick is an exhibition at Accelerator that features a new video presented on a silver-leafed, motorised billboard with a site-specific surround sound. The sound and image installation is accompanied by nine larger-than-life-sized black and white photographs by Annette Frick with portraits of CHEAP from some of their earliest projects, including CHEAP Klub.

The exhibition culminates in the performance Original Sin performed live at Accelerator on September 14 by Vaginal Davis, Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo). Tickets for the performance will be sold via Moderna Museet (more info TBA).

The experimental video Choose Mutation combines found and original footage in a propaganda-like, dystopian collage about paranoia and the effects of social and political control on language and the body. With a layered soundtrack that includes text and lyrics by Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel, found sounds and original music by Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart); the moving image work treats sound as code, text as images and vice versa.


Credits

Concept for exhibition at Accelerator: Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, Martin Siemann

Photography: Annette Frick

Performance: Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, Vaginal Davis, Xiu Xiu (Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart)

Curator: Richard Julin, curator and artistic director Accelerator – in dialogue with Hendrik Folkerts, curator Moderna Museet


Video Credits

With: Maximilian Brauer, Vaginal Davis, Salome Gersch, Gotthard Lange, Susanne Sachsse, Şenol Şentürk, Angela Seo, Marc Siegel, Martin Siemann, Pola Sieverding, Jamie Stewart

Camera: Susanne Sachsse, Şenol Şentürk, Martin Siemann

Montage: Susanne Sachsse

Animation and visual effects: Martin Siemann

Script: Susanne Sachsse & Marc Siegel

Music: Xiu Xiu (Jamie Stewart)

Audio direction: Susanne Sachsse

Sound recording: Utku Sahin

Sound mixing: Boris Wilsdorf @andere Baustelle Tonstudio Berlin

Additional video material: Miriam Gossing and Lina Sieckmann, Peter Haas, Thomas Lambertz, Ruth Schönegge, Walter Solon

Music for the song “Vom Virus lernen” by John Blue

Selected texts borrowed from: Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldúa, William S. Burroughs, Paddy Chayefsky, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Hollaender, Gertrud Koch, Paul B. Preciado

Audio produced by: Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel and Xiu Xiu in co-production with steirischer herbst ’20

Video produced by: CHEAP and Accelerator 2024


(https://acceleratorsu.art/en/utstallning/choose-mutation-with-photographs-by-annette-frick/)

Video still from the video and sound work Choose Mutation (2024). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger




Installation views, Choose Mutation, with Photographs by Annette Frick. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger