Sidsel Meineche Hansen. SECOND SEX WAR.

Gasworks presents 'SECOND SEX WAR', a solo exhibition by London-based artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

Meineche Hansen produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex in what she refers to as a ‘techno-somatic variant of institutional critique’. Her research-led practice includes woodcuts, sculptures and CGI animations often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

'SECOND SEX WAR' features several new commissions, including a pornographic CGI animation, a series of laser-cut drawings and a large-scale ceramic relief. Presented on a virtual reality headset, the animation DICKGIRL 3D(X) appropriates hypersexualised 3D models, ‘genitalia props’ and readymade ‘pose sets’ used for animating sex scenes to critique post-human porn production from within. The large-scale clay relief Cultural Capital Cooperative Object, meanwhile, made with the artists Manuela Gernedel, Alan Michael, Georgie Nettell, Oliver Rees, Matthew Richardson, Gili Tal and Lena Tutunjian, aims to congeal the group’s cultural capital into a cooperatively owned object. In addition, the existing CGI animation No Right Way 2 Cum (2015) and ceramic sculpture Cite Werkflow Ltd (2016) expand, in different ways, on the artist’s research into the commodity status of virtual 3D models in relation to gender. As a whole, 'SECOND SEX WAR' incorporates and reflects on the artist’s working relationships – with her friends, the avatar EVA 3.0 and digital arts studio Werkflow Ltd.

SECOND SEX WAR is commissioned by Gasworks in partnership with Trondheim kunstmuseum and supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. The exhibition will open in Trondheim on 12 June 2016.

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Sidsel Meineche Hansen studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Städelschule in Frankfurt a.M. and Goldsmiths in London. In 2009 she founded the research collective Model Court together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lorenzo Pezzani and Oliver Rees, and in 2015 she co-edited Politics of Study (London and Odense: Open Editions and Funen Art Academy). She is a London-based artist who also currently works as an associate professor at the Funen Art Academy, Denmark and will be a visiting scholar at CalArts in Los Angeles in autumn 2016.

Her recent exhibitions include: Uncanny Valley, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2015); Rehearsals in Instability, Andreas Huber Gallery, Vienna (2015); ONE-self, Temporary Gallery, Cologne and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2015); INSIDER, Cubitt, London (2014), Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street, SPACE, London (2014); J’ai froid, castillo/corrales, Paris, (2014); and Late Barbarians, Gasworks, London (2014).

Her recent seminars include: What is an art work doing? (together with Andrea Fraser), Wattis Institute, San Francisco; This is not a symptom, South London Gallery (2014–15); Methylene Blue diluted by Female Ejaculation, SPACE gallery, London (2014); Why does Fred Sandbeck’s work make me cry?, Cubitt, London and If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam (2014); and HIS HEAD, Gasworks, London (2014). Meineche Hansen has also recently presented artist talks at the Serpentine Gallery and LUX, London (2015); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2015); and 98 Weeks, Beirut (2015).