For our Common Emotional Goals

curator _ Manique Hendricks

Korean(한국어)

The three cups tarot card is often an image of three women dancing and raising their cups for a toast. It represents the celebration of friendship, sisterhood, connection, abundance, cooperation and creative collaborations. But when the card is dealt reversed it could signify an imbalance in social life, solitude, gossip, scandal and excess partying. For our Common Emotional Goals (2021) is the title of a work by Bin Koh visualising three cups overflowing into each other. Cooperation can be defined as the action or process of working together to the same end, involving mutual assistance in working towards a common goal. How can we use cooperation as a strategy to counter the myth of scarcity and binaries of capitalism? How can we move from a scarcity mentality towards an abundance mindset through cooperation?

Binaries of capitalism

The (power) structures of capitalism are divided in binaries; like poor and rich, employees and bosses and men and women. It enforces the idea of scarcity, that there might not be enough of something for everyone. The richer your neighbour becomes, the poorer you get. The binaries are seen as the only two options, purposely excluding other possibilities. A lot of people, especially within the corporate world, have been conditioned to this scarcity condition; jobs are limited, CEO positions are hard to reach and promotions and raises are scarce. But what if life isn’t a finite pie? Meaning people can take more than one slice and not leaving less for others. From an abundant mindset there’s enough of everything for everyone. It's not one or the other, it can all coexist.

The binaries of capitalism created the perfect worker: able-bodied, cisgender, male and commonly white. Capitalism additionally relies on the idea that people reproduce themselves, creating a continuous line of workers, protecting cis-heteronormativity and necessitating sex as a mere means of reproduction. (Queer) identities and bodies that fall outside of these categories often subvert capitalism and its heteronormative foundations while the system simultaneously relies on the unpaid labour of these people.

The concept of scarcity echoes in the way in which we relate to each other as people; who and how we love and befriend. Heteronormative traditions taught us that there’s only one love of our life we should spend the rest of our life with (in marriage). But what if we deserve more love? What if we don’t put all of our expectations on one single person? What if friendship and romantic relationships are seen as equal? In imagining these other future scenarios outside of the existing binary structures (of capitalism), artists can play an important role.

For this particular project, Bin Koh developed a new work titled TOME, presented in the form of a manifesto and pilot version, based on the concept of decorative coffee-table books. The artist recently moved to the central part of Amsterdam after living on the outskirts of the city for six years. In her new neighbourhood she has been paying attention to the coffee-table books that decorate the interiors of the mainly white, Dutch people living there. In the Netherlands, many households keep their curtains open, inviting passersby to take a peek inside. Starting from this observation, Koh recenters the coffee-table book, questioning the Calvinist value of being shameless and innocent to show their privacy whilst the desire to exhibit the upper-middle class taste in the western culture. She’s interested in the gaze of dominant culture, which is, in the case of the Netherlands, largely formed by a colonial worldview. By appropriating the form and value of the coffee-table book in TOME Koh creates a platform/object/playground for marginalised voices and bodies. In the future, the artist is planning to organise an offline showroom for TOME, made by different artists from various backgrounds.

Collectivism

Collectivism in art is an old mode of practice alluding, but not fixed, to collaborative, interactive, co-operative, or relational exchanges between entities with a common purpose.

PHILTH HAUS is a collective that consists of six member-clients represented by ANDRA (Andra Nadirshah). ANDRA is instructed by the various member-entities on how to produce installations, performances and sonics that embody one or multiple collective members. Through this collective, each member hopes to transcend to a realm in which the planet and body are made one via globalised economies, identity semiotics, and biological contamination. Each entity focuses on particular phenomenon such as artificial intelligence’s understanding of young girlhood (SYLLA), endocrine disruption pollution politics (COLY), body material market value and propriety (LYLEX), post-lingual ambient music (ROCO), maternity with disease (ANDRA), and intersectional chemicals used in treatment of psychopathology and in automotive production (PHILIP).¹

In the video SYLLA:ISDIY (2021) PHILTH HAUS questions what it means to be recognized as both human and female in the context of American and European mass media. The concept of the Uncanny Valley (when a system becomes uncannily similar, but not quite, to human appearance) is linked to the transition process of transgender people. Trans people are often held against cisgendered and binary standards when transitioning, where appearing as a cisgendered person (person who identifies with their gender assigned at birth) is seen as the ultimate goal. Compiled of stock footage selected by a machine-learning system from a compiled database, the video hints at the underlying ideas on human perfection and archetypes. SYLLA:ISDIY aims to investigate how the Uncanny Valley intersects when the person in question is both a girl and an artificial intelligence.

Where I Am My Own Other, Where My Mother is Me (2017) is part of an ongoing collaborative project between Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye. Over the years they have developed various performances based on an exchange initiated by Ye: an artwork from Kwak in exchange for an act of “fantasy fulfilment”. Subsequently, Kwak asked Ye to lead them through the trials of becoming a “real woman”. In the video Where I Am My Own Other, Where My Mother is Me, Ye takes on the role of a mother to baby Kwak: she teaches them how to wear makeup and high heels, use sanitary pads and forces the baby to eat cake; reenacting toxic upbringing based on stereotypical ideas on womanhood. Their collaborative work situates itself between trauma and fiction and plays with ideas of gender performativity, heteronormative family power relations and questions concepts on queer and trans identities.

As LGBT identity categories have become increasingly fixed and part of an increasing liberal order of commodity capitalism, Kwak and Ye’s collaboration ruminates on the messy relations between gender performance and temporality of performance through documentation.²

Cooperation reversed

Division, alienation, dissociation, estrangement, disunity, division, conflict, dissonance, friction, inharmony, competition and disconnection are some of the antonyms of cooperation. How the opposite of this keyword is being understood in contemporary society can tell alot about the various meanings and associations of cooperation. Just like the antonyms of cooperation, the reversed three of cups tarot card discussed above, speak to a more often considered darker side of humanity (imbalance in social life, solitude, gossip, scandal and excess partying).

Piping hot tea³

One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel. Often, rather than asserting what they think at the appropriate moment, women say what they think will please the listener. Later, they gossip, stating at that moment their true thoughts. This division between a false self invented to please others and a more authentic self need not exist when we cultivate positive self-esteem.⁴

Gossip has a rich history that dates back to the twelfth century. The definition and the way gossip is viewed by people has changed many times over centuries. The word originates in Old English, as a derivative of god-sibb (godparent), referring to people who pledge to help with the upbringing of a child or to become their guardian if needed, often a close friend of the person that gave birth, echoing their strong connection. A gossip used to be someone you could tell anything, like a sibling or close friend. The word gained a bad reputation around the sixteenth century and the meaning of the word shifted from a powerful bond to someone engaging in idle talk, sharing secrets and discussing other people’s lives.

Female friendships were one of the targets of the witch hunts, as in the course of the trials accused women were forced under torture to denounce each other, friends turning in friends, daughters turning in their mothers. It was in this context that ‘gossip’ turned from a word of friendship and affection into a word of denigration and ridicule. Even when used with the older meaning it displayed new connotations, referring in the late sixteenth century to an informal group of women who enforced socially acceptable behaviour by means of private censure or public rituals, suggesting that (as in the case of the midwives) cooperation among women was being put at the service of upholding the social order.⁵

Art Goss is a platform for high effort art gossip, founded in November 2020 by artists/writers L. Artimer and M. Gossamer. They publish critical narratives and observations on institutions, structures, and phenomena within the Dutch cultural sector and materialise them through instagram, performance and exhibition making. Born out of the inequalities and institutionalised violences of the art world, Art Goss reclaims gossip as a force of legitimate, political knowledge production.⁶ In their new work PEACE AT LAST (2022), they integrated various depictions of gossiping women and torturous devices that were used to keep people from gossiping in the past.

Artist, (type) designer and writer Charlotte Rohde is known for her research on hyperfemininity and pop/internet culture. In her selection of poems titled the feminine urge to (2022), she questions what it means to perform femininity in contemporary culture, and how femininity is valued in a world where attention has become currency, especially online. By combining girls smoking on Tumblr, Lana del Rey, KYLIE lip gloss, corsets, empathy, empowerment and the divine feminine she melts phenomena that are often considered ‘low culture’ with philosophical and analytical reflections.

For this online exhibition artist EMIRHAKIN made a new video work. The video consists of various online footage taken from the point of view of a webcam. Cozy bedrooms, messy backdrops and personal items give a peek into the lives that go behind the computer camera's. Watching each other online becomes a collective activity when screens connect the individual souls behind or before it. EDGING (Verbal) (2023) questions the unequal distance of labor in performance art and webcam performances. What happens to violence when you are not looking at it?

Too much (of something is bad enough)

In 1997 the Spice Girls' song Too Much was released, and the lyrics “Too much of something, is bad enough” traveled the world in the form of a pop ballad. The specific sentence refers to the concept that something can become unpleasant, undesirable or unacceptable when experienced in excess. While abundance is used to describe positive qualities, like ‘an abundance of love’, excess is used to describe the instance or state of surpassing certain ‘acceptable’ limits. Just like capitalism, the concept of excess leans on the ideas that there should be or is a limit on certain things (scarcity). In times where natural sources become scarce, and we have to rethink how to live collectively together, I want to opt for a more abundant mindset and to actively practice generosity taken from the hyperactive plurality that is queerness.