CUNTED The Femme Queer Performance Artist Dani Brown in collaboration with Visual Director and Photographer illlit mints a series of NFT artworks to be dropped on September 30th, 2022. The hyped world of NFTs gets included by the queer femme performance artist Dani Brown, in collaboration with the visual direction of illlit they produce CUNTED – a series of photographs and video works turned into digital assets for the blockchain.
CUNTED
NFT artwork series
Dani Brown
September 30th 2022
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Dani Brown: danibrown.org
Instagram: @danibrownberlin
Twitter: @danibrownberlin
WHAT: The performance artist Dani Brown channels what she calls a “CUNT entity” to whom she gives over her body, voice, intellect, fantasy and artistic practice to produce her first series of digital artworks, CUNTED, crafted exclusively for rapidly growing NFT and web3 spaces. Against the backdrop of existent and continuous gender-based violence, the representation of an empowering approach to one’s own body and sexuality is once again a political imperative. Brown, a virtuoso in her own right, channels CUNT in the same way shamans channel cosmic energy. She is embodied by the undulating, slippery, socially and politically complex organ from which we all came. It’s from this perspective that Brown creates the content for her original digital series, as the world within the world, a voice inside hypertext, queer femme body beyond the coded economy. CUNTED occupies and claims territory, extending its presence through all the realms of perception.
WHY: The video works and photographs deal with questions of corporeality, especially within the context of feminist discourse, which understands the vulva (cunt) not only as a female sexual organ but as a mediator of (female) self-confidence and a matrix of love, creativity and empowerment.
“The bending I consciously do to the will and creative powers of my own sexual organs open a door to a place I have too-seldom experienced: the feminine matrix.”
-Peggy Funk Voth, from The Vulva as a Symbol in the Female Psyche –
CUNTED builds from here and asks broader questions about ownership and valuation of bodies and art. What role does marketability play? How does the existence of the NFT art market and an audience in an unmanageable, potentially borderless network influence the work of the queer femme performance artist today? How does CUNT interact with/intersect with these new potentialities?
Beyond the socially and politically complex thematic of CUNT itself, the series is tied together aesthetically with a set by the Belgian designer Jan Fack with huge floral arrangements curated by Project Cultivation (Kieran Behan and Sina Kempe) and is inspired by the sensually luscious and equally complex Vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th century.
WHEN / WHERE: The series will drop on September 30th, 2022 on the platforms Foundation and OpenSea and there will be a vernissage for the collection on October 1st, 2022 @ 18:00 CET at Dani Brown’s virtual gallery.
The material used in the videos for the series CUNTED is adapted from Dani Brown’s new work for stage titled The Pressing premiered July 29th-31st, 2022 at Radialsystem in Berlin. CUNTED is a production of Dani Brown with a grant from FONDS Darstellende Künste #Prozessförderung, Radial Stiftung with support from UFO Start.
Artistic Statement | Dani Brown:
Dani Brown is a practising choreographer and dancer for more than 20 years. At the centre of her practice is the representation of the queer femme body and the incessant, male-dominated, yet collective, effort to categorize and ascribe meaning onto the very essence of the femme – a place we all come from, a source of life, a bleeding elasticity, a constant flux, ever morphing and ungraspable. Brown’s work refers and flexes by provoking the gaze and simultaneously defying categorization as she slips beyond the grasp of any claim of ownership, pinning down or possessing a hold on the femme body. An encounter always fleeing the totality of sameness, an encounter that is always a place of otherness. The emergence of the new World Wide Web is an invitation for Brown to continue spinning her matrix of otherness. The self-reliant aspect of the NFT space and its lack of dependence on the produced politic of any 3rd party corresponds to a femme queer discourse and the very trajectory of her work.
BIO
Dani Brown left the states when Bush Jr. was elected for the first time. Her works on stage have been presented internationally in Europe, Africa and Asia. When she isn’t busy with her own productions, research or teaching, Brown performs internationally for Ligia Lewis (USA/DE), Vincent Riebeek (NL), Dragana Bulut (RS/DE), Lea Moro (CH), Alexandra Waierstall (DE), Margrét Bjarnadóttir (IS), Antje Pfundtner (DE) and the Japanese clothing label COSMIC WONDER Light Source.
Artistic Statement | illlit
illlit is a photographer, director and artist interested in creating images that stir the uncanny in their onlooker and – with a bit of luck – hint at the infinite; the liminal spaces we vaguely remember from unsettling dreams and the strangely familiar associations of our collective unconscious. By poking around in our shared mire, something might be learned, possibly useless, but undoubtedly interesting. Illlit.xyz
