November 23, 13.00-16.00
Link: https://kunstakademiet.zoom.us/j/4533744648?pwd=V1JtU2dFU1lxWmo2SDhpN3VySlFGdz09
Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. By contextualizing these figures in their respective mythological, linguistic and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.
Zairong Xiang is author of Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018). He has co-curated the “2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial” as a member of the Hyperimage Group at Guangdong Museum of Art. He has curated the “minor cosmopolitan weekend” at the HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2018) and edited its catalogue minor cosmopolitan: Thinking Art, Politics and the Universe Together Otherwise (Diaphanes 2020). He is currently co-curating the exhibition-auditorium-publication project Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) with Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, and Claire Tancons. He teaches Comparative Literature and Art History at Duke Kunshan University and is also the Sino-US joint-venture university’s Associate Director of Art. He is working on two book-exhibition projects, respectively dealing with the concepts of “transdualism” and “counterfeit” in the Global South especially Latin America and China. He was Fellow at the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2014 – 2016) and postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University(2016-2020). All his writings and lectures could be read here: www.xiangzairong.com
