In her photographs and installations, Ines Doujak stages spaces, which make it possible to examine how norms are set and to evoke them as structural and constitutive elements of society. In her first solo exhibition, the artist focuses on the themes of heterosexism and heteronormativity, which organize not only subjectivity and desire, but also language, knowledge and culture, family, state and economy. Doujak approaches these themes through the language of the visual as the dominant force of codification. This approach seeks a discussion of normativity based on the norm, rather than the deviation. In her project for the Secession, Ines Doujak shows that it is possible to treat differences as non-hierarchical relationships and to make the societal structures of power and violence visible at the same time.
The exhibition project will take place in two locations: Ines Doujak will produce a wagon for the Rainbow Parade on June 29, 2002. In the Secession, the exhibition will be shown in the Gallery and in the Grafisches Kabinett.
The artist’s decision to produce a wagon for the parade follows her interest in showing that the regulative moments of heterosexism and forms of self-normalization permeate every section of society—and to this extent, also the parade. Rising above the hetero norm in oppositional deviation, with which the protagonists set the scene of the parade, simultaneously reinforces the organization of the Other on the definitional basis of a heterosexual gender difference.
Ines Doujak thus shifts the action from the wagon as axis of order to the surroundings: whereas only photographic figures on the theme of heterosexism are to be seen on the wagon, around the wagon there are performers and dancers with costumes and hats made of tires with pictures attached to them.
The Rainbow or Christopher Street Day Parade stands for the public demand for the equality of lesbians, gays and transsexuals with heterosexuals. It is a memorial to the events in Christopher Street / New York in 1969, where police harassment of homosexuals led to open resistance and demonstrations in the street for the first time in the lesbian and gay movement.
In the Gallery of the Secession, Ines Doujak picks up the thread of the parade wagon allegorically. Middle-sized trucks made of wood form a wagon circle in the middle of the room. This is reminiscent of wild west films, the settling of new land, and of the mechanisms of social order and demarcation at the same time. Yet perspectives are shifted because of the size. Visitors look from above at the wagon circle and its scenarios.
Behind the visitors, the entire wall surface of the first space in the gallery is wallpapered with a series of large-scale staged scenes of people and animals in nighttime surroundings. The animals are life-sized, white dummies that are used by taxidermists as mounts. The prepared (covered) dummies are arranged in gender pairs and heterosexual family structures for exhibition in museums.
In the allegorical settings, the women and men come together in various constellations, which are reminiscent of dream landscapes and quotations from complex narratives. As in earlier works, Ines Doujak composes domesticating, ruling and performative gestures from a perspective marked by feminism: two women lying close together on the floor of a lifeboat, people standing with their hands raised and faces to the wall among white animal dummies, a man trying to open a door, while a child with a bandaged head clings to his legs, a burning hand being thrust between a woman’s legs.
Whereas visitors cannot enter the inside of the wagon circle either actually or as the phantasmal, empty center, the zone between the wagon circle—the normed architecture of order and settlement—and the photo wallpaper—stage of gender difference—becomes the site of seeing and defining. By repeatedly offering different perspectives in her installation, even they do not enable a resolution or replacement for hierarchical structures, Ines Doujak places visitors in a tableau proposing a discussion of the norm in the process of normalization. At the same time, this is not a static relationship, but rather a zone of contention in the production of representations.
In the Grafisches Kabinett, long cardboard tubes reaching vertically from the ceiling to the floor fill the room. Moving strips of 200 photographs, which were originally attached to the costumes of the dancers, are attached to the tubes. Whereas the people wearing the pictures made them move at the parade, here they are set in motion by visitors moving through the room.
