Artists

Emma Bertuchoz, Manuela Morales Délano, Nicola Genovese, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Tenant of Culture, Young Boy Dancing Group

Press release

Last Tango’s upcoming exhibition takes a special interest in the grotesque and what kind of space it enables. The grotesque disrupts, confronts, and allows audiences to experience contradiction. Its slipperiness is welcome. With grotesque taboo visions, judgment has no place, bodies are unrestricted, and obsessions are lived out. Our compulsive urge for this exhibition is to fixate on the shoe and its grotesque potential. Gradients of the Grotesque revels in the delight that shoes are communicating vessels—powerful and multifaceted storytellers of culture, embodiment, and perhaps even a reflection of our current times. Crocs, Buffalos and Gazelles, all notorious shoes, and many other footwear ‘creatures’ have stomped their way into our cultural imagination. From Cinderella’s glass slippers to Dude Jellies in The Big Lebowski, they form our perceptions about patriarchy, fashion, coolness, femininity, attraction, and sex. Deploying feminist and queer attitudes the artists in the exhibition make palpable the need to express destabilization, excess, and the body or materials pushed to their limits. The exhibition is an encounter with lived experiences: from the hip-swaying heels of sex workers to the pelvic moves of Elvis, the sad irrationality of our throw-away culture, to the defiant political gesture of sabot-tossing and the vulnerable impact of learning how to fall.