To have Vaginal Davis and Yoko Ono on two floors at Gropius Bau is pretty amazing. If you are in need of something with a soul these days, this is the place to go. I had already seen the Yoko Ono show at Tate so I ran through that (don't go to the Yoko Ono show at Neue Nationalgalerie – it's not Yoko Ono's work that is the problem, it's the curators who have no clue what they are doing with this strange side-space - even the Josephine Baker show was a disappointment).
The Vaginal Davis exhibition is lush and joyous. It turns out that it's all worth it: the collaborations, the project spaces, the activism, the parties, the art making, the zines. The show is not so much about specific works as it is about an ambience, a togetherness, that started in the queer punk scene of LA of the 1980s and continued in Berlin of the 2000s.
I took my time in the exhibition, it allowed me to do so. At a certain point, I was spacing out in front of a large scale video installation. When was the last time I spaced out in a show? Let's dream more in art exhibitions, shall we?
My favourite? I loved how the archival photos were displayed behind long wavy curtains hanging from the high ceilings and covering the walls. As a visitor I could take a peek behind those curtains - an intimate gesture for some intimate material: Vaginal Davis with friends, and some more friends. There is love in abundance in this show.
I took home a yellow paper with an excerpt of Vaginal Davis' blog that starts in the middle of a list of names of people encountered during a "jam-packed time in New York City". A day later, on Saturday, February 8, 2014, it continues with more names on a Saturday night out at the Berlin Film Festival. Vaginal Davis meets X and Y, then Z. And the beat goes on.
