Katrina Daschner. BURN & GLOOM! GLOW & MOON!

BURN & GLOOM! GLOW & MOON! Thousand Years of Troubled Genders is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Vienna-based artist and filmmaker Katrina Daschner. The exhibition, carefully put together by guest curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, encompasses works from the 1990s to the present.

Daschner works with various closely interrelated media, ranging from sculpture, textile, music, performance, community-based work, and, most prominently, film, which sits at the heart of BURN & GLOOM! GLOW & MOON!, as does collaboration, an integral and long-standing focus of her practice.

Daschner’s work has tirelessly challenged patriarchal mores and their everyday norms in Western society.  Through various proposals of corporeal fluidity, she scripts and enacts her works herself and with the help of Vienna’s queer community. With stylized performances, she plays with the boundaries of human and non-human, and what is socially defined as the norm, exposing the artificiality of the gendered binary—the dualism of men* and womxn— and the prejudices it generates, freeing the body.

These artistic acts function like threads attaching her stories, stages, and characters together. In her textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. Threading, circling, and wandering are the strategies through which the exhibition BURN & GLOOM! GLOW & MOON! moves, enacting new connections among Daschner’s works. In response to her dreamy settings, certain powerful components of films and performances become evocative installations themselves and touch each other in a new way.

BURN & GLOOM! GLOW & MOON! creates an immersive environment of senses, textures, and feelings. It is a setting in which the monuments of white patriarchal heteronormativity are dismantled stone-by-stone with pain and joy.