A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

The white supremacism of the medical apparatus is a defining problem for Scientia Sexualis. Diverse knowledge practices are haunted by racist pseudoscience and histories of medical abuse. Gynecology is the most notorious case: the white man lauded for inventing the speculum and codifying a treatment of vesicovaginal Fistula (J. Marion Sims) honed his practice through the abuse of enslaved women, performing dozens of surgeries on them without anesthesia. A number of artists in our exhibition take up this history. These two works by KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner) model radically different approaches to the problem of representing this difficult subject.

Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016) presents the viewer with injured, sutured flesh, suspended inside a mirrored box. The condition cited by the work’s title is associated with difficult childbirth and sexual violence. C. Riley Snorton has described it as a “sign of slavery.” Fuck Baloney belongs to a more recent series of interventions which turn from the historical trauma anchored in the bodies of the women Sims abused to the man himself and put whiteness on uncomfortable display. This work is differently revolting, producing a funny and also disgusting canvas of pimpled silicone mortadella slices, into which has been mixed dirt from J Marion Sims’s grave.

Exhibition page.