Featured Image: Still From Sarah Biscarra Dilley’s tʸiptukɨłhɨwatʸiptutʸɨʔnɨ
September 21 – October 19, 2018
La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, 4296 St Laurent Blvd, Montreal
Curated by Lindsay Nixon
Featuring Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Arielle Twist, Dayna Danger, and Amber Williams-King.
Photographs from the opening can be viewed here.
“Why don’t you ever use your strength on me?” she said.
“Because love means renouncing strength,” said Franz softly.
―Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Sry not sry: Kundera was a fucking asshole. If someone asks to be slapped across the face repeatedly so they can spray cum all over your bedroom floor, the back alley you’re making dirty in, or wherever, you better beat the hell out of that beautiful sub bb—if you consent, that is; or if you don’t consent, but like it that way.
Kundera was just another yt boi who drew from centuries old knowledges about eternal return, contained within the stories of Jainism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Turtle Island Indigenous teachings, and Buddhism, just so he could colonize its ethical love logix with his own brand of jerk-off existentialism. I know you didn’t think a yt boi made that shit up[i]?
But we only live once, he whined, time is linear, duh. Sry Kuny, ya basic. With our Mother, we live forever. Leave it to a fuck boi to say that if we, as humans, don’t know outcomes, we can’t ever know if our decisions are right or wrong. We can still ground our actions in good-intent and love, like the teachings from the aunties say. A fuck boi says lightness, where I argue that the draw to empathy is not unbearable, but in itself, sweet. Knowing, accepting, the heaviness of continuity, forever, is, indeed, a loving fate.
Some have asked if ethical love is just a quandary borrowed from the existentialists, walking around some French-Canadian city with a Camus tattoo and worn down copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in their back pocket—a modern day, fuck boi Franz. Don’t get it twisted, the simultaneously ancient and present, ethereal body of colour is a vessel for the O.G. ethical loving and fucking that have always existed in occupied territories.
“The Ethical Etherealness of Fuck and Love” takes back the ethics of intimacy and relationality from those yt bois too light to hold down—Kunedra, Nietzche, Bourriaud. Yes, global colonialism has disrupted our traditional life ways—our ways of loving and being loved. We are sick with an extractive white-supremacist project that has resulted in a loss of our connection to the land and, along with it, our connectivity with all life around us and our understandings of how that connection is fostered through love. But that’s precisely why love is a politic, one which we activate through engagement with ancient technologies—our material cultures. Our sacred kinships and relationalities are encoded within us, hard wired into our bodies. From them, we create something that is both futuristic and of the old ways, embodied through us. We are the children of the diaspora, loving, fucking, and healing ourselves into the future.
Just as human time has never been linear, human love, human fuck, has never been contained in the physical from of humanity. We are phantoms, ethereal, haunting colonized territories with a love that just won’t quit. Because we know love is heavy, oh so heavy. We fuck until the sun comes up. We’ll cum until the world ends and we all plunge into the dark, comfortable hole[ii]. We love our bodies back to life. Because tonight, we are infinite. Thus spoke karma sutra[iii].
[i] A reference to the 2000 film Bring It On.
[ii] A reference to Koko, the sign language speaking gorilla, as told to her caretaker Francine Patterson.
[iii] A play on Nietzche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Jas M. Morgan 