Venice Biennal 2019

3x3x6 Installation:

Inspired by ten cases of imprisonment due to gender and sexual nonconformity, both past and present, the exhibition questions the legal and visual regimes that have formed sexual and gender norms during different ages. The work’s title “3x3x6” refers to the new architectural design of prisons throughout the world: a 3 x 3 square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

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3x3x6 Collateral Event of the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia:

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Public Program

The Failures of Electronic Discipline: A Symposium of Gender and Sexual Outlaws

May 11, 2019, 4–7 p.m.

Psychiatric Hospital Museum of San Servolo (Isola di San Servolo, 30100 Venice, Italy)

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The aim of this public program is to open a debate on the exhibition, fostering dialogue between international artists, critics, and visitors, and giving a discursive and performative context to Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6. The event will take place at the historic site of the Psychiatric Hospital Museum on the island of San Servolo. Ten minutes away by boat from San Marco and with the Palazzo delle Prigioni in sight, San Servolo was—from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the promulgation of the Basaglia Law in the 1970s—an island-hospital dedicated to the segregation and treatment of “mental illnesses.” This categorization included at the time a vast array of gender-, sexual-, and class-excluded subjects such as “repugnant poor people wandering the city,” “unruly women,” “hysterics,” and “deviants.” Thus, San Servolo provides a platform to “look at” the building and the history of the Prigioni from the point of view of another disciplinary institution that historically confined sexual and gender difference.

 

It is also a place from which to reflect on the contemporary transformation of architectures of confinement and their expansion, multiplication, and miniaturization through digital technologies of surveillance, control, and communication. Between fiction and history, critical theory and micropolitical utopia, the event takes shape as a queer symposium involving not only contemporary critics and artists but also reviving some of the historical and contemporary characters and legal cases (including Sade, Casanova, and Foucault) who have inspired 3x3x6. Bringing all of them together into an unexpected encounter, this event seeks to break the limits between representation and action, between critical theory and art, but also between the critique of the prison complex and the invention of technologies of freedom.

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Participants (in order of appearance)

Enrico Wey as CASANOVA X, Performer

Paul B. Preciado, Curator

Félix Maritaud as FOUCAULT X, Performer

Audrey Tang, Poetician and Taiwan’s Digital Minister

Matthew Fuller, Media Theorist

Shu Lea Cheang, Artist

Liz Rosenfeld as SADE X, Performer

Jack Halberstam, Cultural and Gender Theorist

Khaleb Brooks as D X, Performer

Aérea Negrot as B X, Performer and Musician