Anso Van Wyk

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Gay

This body of work explores queerness through failure and embraces queer joy as an act of refusal. Queerness already embodies failure in a heteronormative, capitalist society due to its chronological uncertainty and refusal to internalise and perform the supposed connections between production and reproduction. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure (2011), I am intrigued by uncertainty’s ability to disrupt and act as a catalyst for generating new ways of experiencing gender and sexuality.

In exploring queer joy, I am drawn back to my childhood. I am not interested in the people who formed me, and I will not ponder the punitive heteronormative world that I was forced to endure. Rather, I turn my gaze to who I was before conditioning had become effective. If I were to follow Halberstam’s assertion that children are already queer, given society’s urgency to rectify them in all means possible, could calling on my anarchist, silly, irrational self not act as a mode of refusal? I evoke the queerness and rebellion of my childhood by incorporating playfulness and intuition in my praxis. In my sewing of interactive soft sculptures, my bizarre video performances, and my photographic celebration of silly, pointless visuals, I disregard planning as a refusal of gendered, generational logics.

Through a process led by impulse, intuition and un-knowing, I purposefully try to fail, questioning the boundaries between success and failure. I look to silliness and stupidity as resistance and ask my viewer to consider the possibility for pleasure outside of hetero-capitalist confinements.