The catalogue includes all visual and textual works that are a part of the EnGendered Species Exhibitions.

Bronwen Casson | Dublin, Ireland | artist website

Flux (n.) The act of flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing stream; constant succession; change

Seemingly simple, the four letters in the word flux unpretentiously combine to create a meaning that powerfully endangers the gender binary. In the 21st century, what does it mean to “undo” gender? To truly “undo” gender, we need to think of gender from a perspective that allows it flow, mutate and cross over the boundaries of the body without fixing to an identifying system. If gender classifying systems are merely propagated with new labels, we still surrender to old systems no matter how open, or expanded, they may appear.

Bronwen Casson presents gender as it should appear, an enigma marked by a continuous flow, and so the flow begins with Flux, a 3.55 minute video work by the Dublin-based artist. In Flux gender is elusive, ephemeral and impossible to grasp or identify as it ambiguously slips in and around the body. Beautifully illustrated in the graceful, fluid forms of a white veil, gender is visualized as a constant flow across the body as it bends, twists, loops and spirals without betraying the identity of its wearer. Gender as a noun, a descriptor of a body or performance, is a phantom concept as the body remains evasive, secured in a private world free from identifying systems. Silently, the white veil undulates across the body, rather than attaching itself to a stable point of identity. Our conception of gender as an identity is not simply breached, but absent. We cannot place it, categorize it or find an end goal but rather it becomes a constant flow of change.

The sense of absence in Casson’s work makes gender elusive and plays powerfully through that which is present before us. In Woman - Shibam, Yemen, Casson engages us with an image of a figure dressed in the traditional khimar, a very long, loose head covering and face veil worn by women of the Muslim faith. Enshrouded by clothing laden in social codes, the figure’s gender seems immediately available to us, but almost as quickly as it appears, it escapes coding. The figure is completely concealed in black, which when translated into a photograph becomes a void. It is a blank spot in the image that by itself will not indicate the wearer’s gender identity, and through which the hollowness of signifying systems become apparent. Do the signs tell us who is under the veil? The blackened mark on the photo’s surface does not reveal anything but a slippery sign system. The sign system slippage also plays out in the gaze as the power and pleasure we take in looking slips as the figure loses material form. Is the figure protected from our gaze? Veiled by the khimar, does the figure own her own gaze, or succumb to the cultural gaze of the male viewer in the image?

In Casson’s work, the veil becomes an interesting surface on which gender identity can be played. It is a formless, malleable covering that offers multiple reads as it flows without fixing, signifies the wearing or veiling of an identity, or gives us a point of slippage in the system.

- by Kristen Raizada