GHOSTS

Galerie im Turm  |  curated by Sylvia Sadzinski  |  July 4 – August 18, 2019

In GHOSTS, Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo investigates intimacies and the complexity of interper-sonal relationships. Working with sculpture, installation and video, she addresses notions of femininity, female sexuality and misogyny. In doing so, she illuminates their entanglements with political and social power structures including racialisation and categories of identity such as age.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the video work Protest and Desire(2019), which portrays the 49-year-old Ugandan-born Lilian, who lives in Germany. In a series of interviews, she re-ports of her personal experiences as a HIV-positive, Black woman in Germany while subtly pointing towards the inherent prejudices that women of colour experience within and outside of their own communities. She provides insight into the way she deals with personal ghosts of the past and present, and the struggle for societal visibility and acceptance. This is expanded through dream-like and associative sequences that move between lightness and darkness, weaving together notions of innocence and danger. Protest and Desire demonstrates the extent to which shame, stigma and isolation can be transformed into strength and self-empowerment, expanding the complex and multi-layered narratives around dealing with HIV and AIDS acti-vism, in which women, in particular women of colour, have historically been silenced and –now as then – are rendered invisible.Through this, the video work exposes a plethora of struc-tural problems, in particular in relation to Germany's treatment of migrants, biological and health politics when dealing with HIV and PrEP revealing Eurocentric patterns of thinking. The video-collages Cool Girl (2019) and Bitches and Witches (2019) address themes of inherent societal racism and misogyny, as well as their interconnections. Pop cultural film se-quences from the late 1980s, 1990s and the early 2000s are rearranged and augmented. They reflect societal stereotypes and social modes of behaviour. Accumulated in this manner, they point towards the permanent medial reproduction of traditional and limited understandings of femininity. At the same time, the video-collages provide a self-empowering new interpretation of all of those images that – often in an unreflected way – accompany us.

Complemented by the sculptural works Heart of Glass (2018), Heels for All(2019),  It’sComp-licated(2019) andAs Long As You Remember Who’s Wearing the Trousers (2019), GHOSTS is intended as a feminist contribution to discourses addressing female sexuality and toxic relationships. At the same time it underscores the fact that the social representation and individual disciplining of the body is always closely connected with social regulation.Which ghosts surround us, and which of these ghosts do we carry inside ourselves?