Berlin: Mary Coble – Performing Queer Resistance

Press release by Schwules Museum*

Artist Talk: Mary Coble – Performing Queer Resistance
Saturday, November 14, 2015 at 19:00
Schwules Museum*, Berlin, Germany

Mary Coble, artist and educator will discuss queer strategies of resistance through artistic practice and activism. Coble’s live work and multimedia installations revolve around queer politics, poetics and histories, often imploring
unpredictability, messiness and failure as ways of subverting mainstream expectations and desires.

This talk will include examples from Coble’s work such as: Blood Script (2008) where hate speech was gathered from a public and tattooed inklessly on the artist’s skin as an act of solidarity; Fighting Cocks (2011) a durational performance in a locker room exploring queer masculinities in gendered spaces; Deferral (2013), a collective protest calling for the gay hero in face of the discriminatory practices that disallow gay men from donating blood; and Performing Defiance (2015) where the gesture of the raised fist combined with extensive glitter bombing was repeated ad absurdum pointing to the political power of “tactical frivolity”.