THEORETICAL GORE

24 June 2025, 8:00pm

SPAZIO GRIOT 2025 | The System Concedes Nothing Without Demand
Pavilion 9b
SPAZIO GRIOT 2025 | The System Concedes Nothing Without Demand
Pavilion 9b

 
Written and designed by Lex Brown 
Performance Lex Brown with Val Wandja
With dramaturgical direction by Chiara Cimmino, Valero Garaffa
 
"Theoretical gore” is the terminology for the road markings in the US that designate the triangular area between the main highway and an off-ramp. This space of demarcation is not a warning zone, but an indicator that one road has already diverged from another. In this performance, Brown explores this symbolism and the metaphorical "off-ramp" we find ourselves on with regard to emergent politics. The installation consists of a scene of imminent wreckage: a cardboard Tesla Cybertruck heading straight for an industrial fan, careening through the space, ripping up a painted backdrop of astroturf-green grass. The artifice of the scene calls to mind a cheap version of Hollywood stagecraft, evoking the flimsy authority of the current political system and its relationship to entertainment. The artist will voice and wrestle with the ideologies that dominate the current political discourse in the U.S. through speech, song and utterance inducing an incongruent slippage both in language and in topic.
 

Lex Brown is an artist working in visual and performed verse. She has performed and exhibited work at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the New Museum, the Kitchen, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, and Recess in New York; the M.I.T. List Center, REDCAT Theater and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; The Baltimore Museum of Art; and at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. She was a 2021 recipient of the USA Fellowship and is a 2025 Rome Prize Winner. Her first short opera, Tati (composed by Kyle Brenn), premiered in the Washington National Opera’s 2024-25 season at the Kennedy Center. Brown holds degrees from Yale University (MFA) and Princeton University (BA). She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer, a sci-fi erotic novella that takes on surveillance and social justice, first edition published by Badlands Unlimited. Consciousness, a survey of Brown's work spanning the past 8 years, was published by GenderFail. Containing documentation from 46 different videos and performances, as well as 33 original song lyrics performed in artist-run spaces, museums, music venues, and galleries it has been acquired by the collections of the Met, MoMA, Whitney, and SFMoMA museums amongst other notable collections.Brown has taught in the Visual Arts program at Princeton University. and in Art, Film, & Visual Studies and Theater, Dance, & Media at Harvard University.

 
 
Admission free while places last

part of

19 June - 17 July 2025
The public progrmme at Padiglione 9b - Mattatoio
Padiglione 9B, Performer: Prinz Gholam
13 luglio, ore 12-13
SOLO SU INVITO
13 luglio, ore 12-13
13 luglio, ore 12-13

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