Plight of the Albatross w/ Connie Fu
Schedule
Thu Jun 17 2021 at 08:00 pm
Location
Station Museum of Contemporary Art | Houston, TX
Connie Fu (of performative duo yFFy) plays the Portal of Answers in PLIGHT OF THE ALBATROSS, a multimedia performance braiding together historic queer Houston-based publications, stories of self-discovery and Asian diaspora, and questions about connection and community in the present. What begins as a one-person play expands to include the audience in a collective melodrama. The whole performance functions as a ritual, during which the original intent of local print publications to disseminate news, issue warnings, and connect members of the queer community and subcommunities is brought forth as a collection of sentient specters.https://www.connie-fu.com/
Connie Fu is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in textiles, sound, and performance. She combines techniques and materials to create multidimensional environments in which narratives inspired by personal mythologies unfold. Objects are used as props and left as artifacts of performance gestures. Recently, Connie performed The Chrysanthemum’s Folly at Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia with collaborator Jungmok Yi. Her objects were recently exhibited at FiveMyles in New York, Stay Home Gallery in Paris, Tennessee, and online at Acogedor Space.
http://withoutarchitecture.site/
The first brick thrown at Stonewall — what has become the origin myth for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement signals, by way of the brick — the essential tooled apparatus of architecture, a radical indigeneity in queer engagement with the built environment. Today, the “gayborhood,” as it exists under late capitalism, is a commodity fetish on display exhibiting and marketing queerness as state-oriented activism and testifying to the depoliticization of LGBTQ+ people under a neoliberal rubric of “gay rights.” Rainbow-packaged Oreos and other late capitalism tokens re-frame the Stonewall riots' initial obstruction into a sterilized history.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is a curatorially driven series of actions by a group of multidisciplinary artists whose practices are rooted in critiquing the convergence of politics and the built environment. The series draws from the unrecorded history of Mary’s Naturally, a legendary Houston gay bar and one of the oldest in Texas by the time of its permanent closing in November 2009. From Houston’s “Stonewall equivalent” to a “coffeehouse with gourmet, barista-made drinks, home-baked goods & light fare in an industrial space,” Mary’s redevelopment is a revealing allegory exposing the politics embedded within the built environment of the gay village. The exhibition series is set to occur every June at the former Mary’s outback, now a paved parking lot, running alongside the citywide and national gay pride month commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. The continual reactivation of the site also recalls and functions as a continuation of early AIDS mourning practices and works to materialize, if only briefly, the inscribed trauma of what we cannot see. The Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of GLBT History estimates that as many as 300 people were laid to rest or had their ashes scattered at the exhibition site.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is presented by Junior Fernandez and S Rodriguez with support from the Station Museum of Contemporary Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Where is it happening?
Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 1502 Alabama St, Houston, TX 77004, United States
Tickets
USD 0