黑料不打烊

Honor Fraser is pleased to present Erotic Codex, a group exhibition that surveys the liberatory affordances of sex, and the erotic devices that artists use to harness power in an evolving digital landscape. Featuring fifteen artists who embrace the body as a site for rupture, rapture, and reconciliation, the exhibition asks how emerging technologies reconfigure cultural norms around sex, just as they shape the political impact of sexuality at home and in public. In turn, EroticCodex illuminates the entangled ways that we understand intimacy, artificiality, and our own bodies through the prolonged relationships we share with the technological objects at hand.

Cocurators Jamison Edgar and Alice Scope arouse influential essays by Audre Lorde, Legacy Russell, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha to examine the fantasies our erratic media ecosystems engender. Their exhibition is indebted to these three trailblazing scholars and the theories of power, glitch, and care that they forward. In turn, Erotic Codexchampions the nuanced ways that queer, femme, and disabled people claim agency, autonomy, and pleasure on their own terms. 鈥淭he device,鈥� seen as both a technological companion and a rhetorical instrument, is taken up to observe the divergent modalities of sex across fleshy-messy networks on鈥� and offline.

In her 1978 essay 鈥淯ses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,鈥� Lorde outlines the ways that men weaponize and distort erotic desire against people who do not fit neatly into the categories of traditional masculinity. Lorde argues that, as a result, the erotic has long been underestimated as a source of empowerment. In the years since its publication, however, 鈥淯ses of the Erotic,鈥� has become a cornerstone of feminist literature, and Lorde鈥檚 call to embrace the power of self-realized desire has catalyzed rigorous debates on the utility and ethics of body autonomy, pornography, sex work, and gendered labor. Erotic Codex continues in this tradition鈥攁sking visitors to contemplate the devices that generate erotic power in an era of accelerating technological proliferation.

Drawing upon nearly three decades of research in the fields of art, technology, and performance, Scope and Edgar cruise the archives of hybrid desire, transforming Honor Fraser into a multisensorial compendium that is at once seductive, deviant, and full of pleasure. Visitors to the gallery will find Honor Fraser veiled in the hued tones of a red-light district, peppered with sculpture and media installations that divide the gallery into four erotic zones.

In the gallery鈥檚 largest exhibition hall, a grouping of seven artworks by Bora, Ayanna Dozier, Lolita Eno, Xia Han, Huntrezz Janos, Maggie Oates, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Miyo虉 Van Stenis dance across a company of suspended video monitors. These pole-dancing avatars greet, tease, and flirt with visitors as they navigate an erotic gym caught between intimacy and exhibitionism. Past the gym, Lucas LaRochelle mounts a large-scale installation of their geolocated web browser, Queering the Map, along with QT.Bot, an artificial intelligence model trained with the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform.