Becoming Horse Girl movie series: Piaffe

5 - 5:30 PM Garfield Gallery

Tour My mother is a horse. An exhibition by Cat Birk with artist, Cat Birk.

5:30 - 7 PM Chazen Auditorium

Piaffe film screening

illustrates the erotics of the relationship between self and image during the process of identity formation. Eva, the protagonist, quite literally transforms into a horse girl, and we feel her confidence in this new embodiment. Finding her new form in her attempts to perfectly recreate the sounds of a horse, Eva shows the tenderness and emancipatory potential in the gesture of replication.

PIAFFE

2022 | Drama | 86min | Germany | German, English with English subtitles

Directed by ANN OREN

Written by ANN OREN and THAIS GUISASOLA

Shot on lush 16mm, Oscilloscope Laboratories presents PIAFFE, a visceral journey into control, gender and artifice.

Introverted and unqualified, Eva is unexpectedly tasked with foleying the sound for a commercial featuring a horse. As she slowly acclimated to the new job, her obsession with creating the perfect equine sounds grows into something more tangible. Eva harnesses this new physicality, becoming more confident and empowered, and lures an unassuming botanist into an intriguing game of submission.

Artist statement on My mother is a horse. An exhibition by Cat Birk

I find relatable images in many places: trans literature, romantic encounters, and horse girl memes. Seeing myself in these images changes how I understand my embodiment and expands the web of relationships that forms my identity. These relationships are a source of strength and comfort. I coat the surface of my body with these images like a protective membrane: they become my emotional support images.

I am interested in how encounters with images and objects serve as conduits for processes of identity formation and the creation of trans4trans (t4t) networks. Locating, identifying with, and transforming these images has played an important part in forming my own transgender identity and finding my own (horse) girlhood. In these encounters, I expand my sense of self by identifying with something outside myself, reshaping the images themselves. Horses become fugitive signifiers of desire, support, and the (bio)genesis of a blossoming transfemininity. Entangling selfand other in this way emphasizes the highly mediated nature of embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between individual and collective identities. This exhibition weaves paintings, silicone surfaces, prints, and sculptural objects into a t4t grid installation. Through casting and the repetition of the grid, I create relationships between multiples. My experimental approach to the process and materiality of casting focuses on its intimacy and reciprocity, recontextualizing the fraught, hierarchical relationship between copy and original. Understanding casting as mutable and imperfect, my objects become materializations of transness and allegories for t4t praxis. t4t describes desire and attraction, but also trans practices of mutual aid, care, and solidarity.

This installation uses the grid, the multiple, and the horse to signify trans embodiments and t4t methodologies that build trans community through mutual identification with images. Understanding the affective relationships between image (other) and identity (self), I recast the individual process of identity formation as a collective act of becoming that supports trans flourishing. Weaving webs between image, self, and community, I want this exhibition totransform my images into an emotional support t4t network.

Host or Publisher Chazen Museum of Art