02.10.2021

Opening: In Excess

Opening of 3hd 2021 Festival

Activations by participants:
Gestalta & Dasniya Sommer: flux nX cusp
Federica Dauri & Hermes Pittakos in collaboration with Peaches

“In Excess” understands itself as a mental image, a template for interpreting connection, exploring power relations and the sensory experience of our present through BDSM. Curated by Creamcake and happening as part of the seventh 3hd edition, called “Power Play”, the group exhibition features nine artists, collectives and collaborations who negotiate convention through the consensual practice of sadomasochism and play. Running at Park Center Treptow from October 2 to 31, it fearlessly embraces taboos in sexuality, sharing a fascination with authority and the desire for transgression and contradiction, as well as a longing for a loss or conscious relinquishment of control.

Western societies have reached their limits of existence, becoming—to quote artist and producer Vika Kirchenbauer, aka COOL FOR YOU—“united in shame” rather than dignity. Meanwhile, people in the private sphere long for a sense of relief, excess and unbridled pleasure. Here, relationships of power in society can be reconfigured in a playful, erotic and sexual manner, consciously hidden and separated from everyday life. 3hd 2021: “In Excess” cruises the infinite approaches to BDSM and its many loaded symbols, forms, and experiences, publicly engaging, and often subverting existing social norms through photography, video and sculpture, installation, performance, and site activations. The works in the exhibition focus on the aesthetics of lust, while imagining notions of dominance and submission, softness and hardness, power and surrender. Each encounter makes visible the potent sensuality that’s generated outside of the mainstream.

“In Excess” acknowledges that BDSM itself does not directly reflect existing hierarchies or systems, but as a cultural practice it is coupled with the experiential potentials of collective realities. Especially in times of a pandemic, where physical contact has not only been extremely restricted, but assigned a new risk awareness, these connections need to be described, analyzed, and discussed with more urgency. The body once again appears as a major site on which the hazards of intimacy between sovereignty and vulnerability is negotiated.

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With:
Image by Jon Lucas
Other Event of this Series:

More on 3hd 2021: Power Play

Venue

Park Center Treptow

Am Treptower Park 14
12435 Berlin