In connection with birth, the term Spirale (spiral and coil in German) rather reminds of a contraceptive than a visual design element which appears as the exhibition's symbol. The rotating spiral serves as the visual and content-related basis for both the animation "WORLD's FIRST" and the graphic design for the presentation of the artistic contributions in the exhibition. In different cultures, religions et al. the spiral is the symbol for creation.
(Graphic: Kerstin Rajnar)

Art contributions for the virtual exhibition GEBURT_to animate

The thematically ordered art works address natural and artificial processes that create life within a cultural dynamic. They show desires for the composition of "creation" and range from the the metaphoric realization in artistic processes to the "self-design" of life.

BODY IMAGE – DESIRE – FERTILITY - LIVESTYLE – BIRTH – BODY MOVEMENTS – GENDER CONSTRUCTS – MYTH – ORACEL – GODDESS – FLUID GENDER / SEX – CULTURAL OTHER

BODY IMAGE

Zara Alexandrova (DE) adresses in her object "Mirror, Mirror..." our quest for perfection amid a growing obsession with body image. It seems that women now have a new part of the anatomy to worry about - their vaginas. Our perception of what is normal nowadays is most definitely clouded by the proliferation of pornographic images featuring women with smaller - and often heavily airbrushed - private parts. This often results in labiaplasty. CONTRIBUTION >>

	DESIRE
	Bernhard Krähenmann (CH) illustrates in his gouache "Ich wache über Dich" his sincere desire for a family on an extremely personal and emotional level and longs for gender roles bound to nature: [...] The mother's torso depicts my hope for a family with Susanne. She would do EVERYTHING for her child. [...] I am the falcon. I keep a jealous watch over mother and child. I want to be there for them, protect them and keep them away from all evil. [...] CONTRIBUTION >>

FERTILITY - LIVESTYLE

Rachelle Beaudoin (US) gives "birth" to a jade egg in her performance "Untitled". The yoni egg was made famous after being touted as a healing and muscle building product on the lifestyle blog Goop. "Untitled" is a personal reflection and cultural criticism on the ways sexuality and health are marketed and sold to women in the United States. For the artist, the egg and the form of the egg become fodder for her work as she uses the object not as it was intended but as a metaphor for fertility and birth. CONTRIBUTION >>

	BIRTH
	Gertrude Moser-Wagner (AT) refers to birth as an artistic and social process - as a cultural process. In her video "Vierteldrehung Wienergasse" the calls for liveliness are circulating. "Enlivenment" (*) is the ne plus ultra and with good reason. The often-quoted anthropocene is searching ways out of this term's unavoidability. However, to celebrate life implies to feel alive yourself. In German we say we "go pregnant" - we carry ideas when we start projects. a very pregnant woman is, metaphorically, an artistic godsend. *Enlivenment. Eine Kultur des Lebens: Versuch einer Poetik für das Anthropozän | Andreas Weber, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2016 CONTRIBUTION>>

BODY MOVEMENTS

Ada Kobusiewicz (AT/PL) shows a newborn baby from different points of view in her walk-in installation "Tara". Not as a cute miniature of a human but as a growing personality. Tara develops in the world of a newborn baby, putting emphasis on her body movements provoked by different emotions, absolutely real and transparent. Tara´s mind and body interact. The attention of the visitors is focused on her movements to reevaluate the human body and its natural behaviour. CONTRIBUTION >>

	GENDER CONSTRUCTS
	Teresa Ascencao (CA) questions the merging and division of a man and woman, Busby Berkeley style, in her tongue-in-cheek video "Man and Woman". The video is a metaphorical play on assumed binary biological and social constructs of gender. It plays with these binary assignments, in context of cellular divisions in the development of the sex of a person, and societal impositions of the same. Man and Woman is an exploration of a heteronormative love, so intense that it destroys it normatively. CONTRIBUTION >>

MYTH

Yvonne Beelen (NL) was inspired and accompanied by an ancient Japanese myth of the supreme goddess Amaterasu in her installation "アマテラスの赤ちゃん". In this myth the vagina turns out to be the story’s heroin. In a nation where the vagina primarily remains unspoken with an awkward resonance, the artist dreamt of giving birth to a new insight to create some relief and enlightenment. To do so she invited Japanese people to sit down on a ‘futon’ shaped as this ‘most female body part’, build out of materials which usually are very comfortable. CONTRIBUTION >>

	ORACEL
	Renate Kordon (AT) tries to display the vitality and wisdom of the uterus in today's context in her animated film "Delphoi". She was inspired by the 32.000 to 36.000 year old stone figurine, also known in German as the "dancing Fanny von Galgenberg" and possible original meanings of the oldest female figurines. Dancing ova and wombs alternate with texts on the Oracle of Delphi, the shot of a gynecologist and the womb's capacity to "see" in old age. The uterus becomes an actress, acrobat and dancer. CONTRIBUTION >>

GODDESS

Barbara Schmid and Ulla Sladek (AT) reflect on haptic medial work in the video "Geburt der Venus". Venus is born out of a ceramic Camera Obscura. It's not a clean or painless act: hands break and destroy the Camera. The work moves back to the beginnings of photography when it was referred to as the "light-born goddess" (Erwin Fiala) and to the beginnings of life when the tactile sense was central for exploring and observing our environment and ourselves. The photographic result is unique. CONTRIBUTION >>

	FLUID GENDER/SEX
	Boryana Rossa (US)  performs a manifesto of a future free of gender distinctions in "The Last Valve". Rossa sews her vulva shut with surgical thread, playing with the common Bulgarian sexist expression “stitched up cunt”. Rossa was inspired by existing transgender models of sexuality in the animal world, by sexually hybrid human and animal bodies, and by the emergence of artificial robotic and biological cyborgs that are free of gender determinations. All these models propose escape from heteronormative binarism. These models also propose possible society, which has the potential to accept more flexible notions of sex and gender. CONTRIBUTION >>

CULTURAL OTHERS

Maja Smekar (SI) uses co-evolution between a human and a dog as a matrix to establish the empathic distance towards the Other in her work series „K-9_topology“. In ARTE_mis, her final project, the artist is wondering about who manages our reproductive freedom and who establishes the rules of ethics in general, what defines humans as a superior species and what (still) makes us human in a post-human future? Smrekar's conclusion is suggesting our own animality. CONTRIBUTION >>

	Kerstin Rajnar (AT) animates in her work "WORLD's FIRST" the end of a development process. It returns what has been created to the actual origins and shows the formation process in its very own liveliness. „Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics." (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Foreword, 1946) CONTRIBUTION >>