Aimee Heinemann is presenting solo exhibition COPE AGAINST COPE at London’s new Life Gallery, running January 29 to February 5.
It’s easier to define what you’re not rather than what you are and, in working around a theme of negation, particularly across gender and sexuality, the artist, writer and “post-anarchist clubkid” of the angstravaganza Tumblr nudges to a way of interrogating the limits of an existing order from the Saul Newman-defined “point of alterity or exteriority”. After all, according to Heinemann’s exhibition blurb, “representation is the misrepresentation you can bear”.
Read the full piece below and see the L1fe gallery website for details. **
“The physics of weaponised disintegration strategies, I’m done dissolving,
let’s fall apart at something, ‘at’ not as in ‘in response to’, ‘at’ as in
‘towards’ or ‘in the direction of’. [Q: What gender is the collapsed core of
a dead star?] Transubstantiation trickles down the side of your face
(literally) and we try asbestos we can to keep our heads above water. What’s
wrong? I’ve just realised that all objects have reflective surfaces and now I
can’t touch you and I don’t think that anyone can fix anyone else but I want
someone to tell me that’s neoliberal. Subjects as objects as subjects in
dialogue with themselves as objects and subjects under capital, say it
without smirking, I dare you- wait don’t, don’t worry, I can’t either. I mean
if I bite my fist hard enough it’ll soak up the violence?
It didn’t work I just drooled thick gloopy mediation, I’m sorry I’ll clean it
up later. Today I am cornflour and cornflowers and carbon monoxide detectors
and dried lavender and amorphous negation fantasies and mucus. What else you
got? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours and we can both pretend there’s
something there but vulnerability is a muscle and muscles don’t collapse,
they rot and I’m scared of getting stronger. [A: ‘It’s empty because the
object or system that collapsed to form it in the first place has shrivelled
away to nothing. The common idea that [______] is just made of very
compacted matter – it’s wrong. It’s just simply wrong. It may have been
created from very compacted matter but the matter is gone, and it’s been
completely destroyed, it no longer exists.’] Representation is the
misrepresentation you can bear and there are no safe words.”
– Aimee Heinemann / National Geographic, 2014
