VISU gallery 9.9.–9.10.2010

The exhibition is a mix of sound. Photographic and video works by Ingrid Ung(ex Valter Kokot).

In the video , the artist herself sings,dances and tries on different clothes and tells about the tragicomic situations she has found herself in because of an ongoing process of sex change. Everyday situations often acquire Kafkaesque features when one’s name and social security code are based on a polar idea of sex. A third alternative is missing from bureaucracy, from forms and also from people’s thinking habits. In addition to the videos, the show includes photographic self-portraits where Ung has captured some of the ambivalence of the in-between state, being hormonally a woman, yet physically a male. Also included is Birdsong Book, an audio book in English, which explores personal relationships and hear music composed/sung by her.

Transsexuality is something more complex than merely a physical change from male to female: it implies a discovery and acceptance of oneself, the attainment of a natural state of being. She began the process 2004 and did the last gender reassigment surgery in august 2008. She has worked both with the inbetween state 2004-2008  as it is meaningful and creative, being both sexes at once, yet not fully either and reflecting 2008-2010 on the process of ready surgical construction of identity and the mental formation of identity through society/culture.

Ambivalence and open-endedness are typical to the art of her, things can be simultaneously both this and that, as well as the other. There are no readymade interpretations to offer, instead the works will serve as a creative impulse to a dialogue with the audience.

“The exhibition is a journey of exploration into the state of transsexualim. Instead of simplistic male/female dualism, I try to indentify a third approach to the construction of identity, gender and sexual orientation. The important thing in art would be to process one’s own state and situation critically, in this case my own transsexuallity, and to establish points of contact with basic humanity without the ballast  of sexuality, background and social status. Therefore im not merely examining my own status, but also looking on a broader front at how our identities and bodies are being continuously created by our awareness and our gaze. In my works there is a tension between beauty and hardness, between the sensual and the everyday. The idea is to ambivalence and opposites to mobilize the associative function of the mind and to visualize a world with multiple voices, where things could be more alive than we are able to imagine or observe in our conscious mind.”