is my heart worthy of contempt…?

私の心臓はそんなに汚いですか…?




An exhibition by (O)Kamemochi


Date: 31st May (Fri) - 2nd June (Sun) 
11:00 - 17:00
Venue: Datsuijo - (a) place to be naked
Entry: Free

(O)Kamemochiによる展示


日時:5月31日(金)-6月2日(日) 11:00 - 17:00
会場:脱衣所 - (a) place to be naked
料金:無料


Artists and Researchers|アーティストと研究者
珍熙. (Jini) Vivi Zhu Cléo Verstrepen and Serhat Orta Nina Zhao Ana Jovanovska   Dima Abou Zannad

Curators|キュレーター
Sun Kim Georgieva Lyudmila

Designers|デザイン
Ana Jovanovska Lea Embeli 

Arts Management|アートマネジメント
Alissa Osada-Phornsiri (長田ポンシリ・アリサ)


Let me show you, come inside. See the door shutting behind your back. Now look.
見せてあげるから、中に入って。背中の後ろで扉が閉まるのを見届けてから。さあ、見て。



Is my heart worthy of contempt…?” is an exhibition that explores emotion, language, and culture through the female gaze.

Historically men engaged with public life, creating the shared cultural rules, while women remained inside the house, building their lives in private. We know, however, that within the confines of their rooms, they nevertheless managed to build vibrant communities and dynamic ways to engage with reality in parallel to the grant cultural narrative. Queer, minority, or otherwise marginalized groups too were forced to create their lives in secret, invisible to the mainstream, and seemingly without a place in the public sphere.

In the margins, those communities, operating often in secret, devised unique ways of communication and connection, building friendships and sharing meaning.

“Is my heart worthy of contempt…?” aims to recreate such a place: separate from the dominant order, hidden inside, where the ignored voices of the different can speak and the visitors can listen and answer in return. By letting our audience freely browse and engage with the art in a non-prescriptive way, finding their own interest within the objects and artworks, we hope to inspire a different outlook towards culture and community that may continue outside the limits of the exhibition space.

In today’s world where the tried-and-true methods of thinking and doing more often than not fail to meaningfully address impending problems like discrimination, violence, and climate those alternative ways of seeing and engaging, may present new possibilities to approach reality and our place within


『私の心臓はそんなに汚いですか…?』は、女性の眼差し(Female Gaze)を通して感情、言語、文化を探索する展覧会です。

歴史上、男性は公的領域において文化的制度を作り上げ、女性は家の中に留められ、私的領域で人生を築いてきました。しかし私たちは、彼女たちが部屋という限られた空間にいながらも、活気に満ちたコミュニティを形成し、大きな文化的ナラティブやリアリティとのダイナミックな方法での関わりを成し遂げてきたことを知っています。クィアやマイノリティなどの社会から周縁化されてきた人々もまた、メインストリームや公的領域において不可視化され、自分たちの人生を水面下で築き上げることを余儀なくされてきました。

しばしば秘密裏に稼働しているこのような周縁化されたコミュニティは、独自のコミュニケーションとつながりの方法を考案し、友情関係を結び、意味を共有してきました。

『私の心臓はそんなに汚いですか…?』は、そのような場所を再現することを目的としています。支配的な秩序から離れ、隠されてきた内側で、無視されてきた異質な者たちが語ることができ、その声に来場者が耳を傾け、返事をすることができる場所です。私たちは、来場者が会場内を自由に歩きまわり、固定された視点ではない方法でアートと関わり、作品やオブジェの中に自分自身の興味を見出すことで、文化やコミュニティに対するこれまでとは異なる視点のひらめきを得て、会場という限られた空間の外でもそれが続くことを願っています。

差別や暴力、気候変動といった緊迫する問題に対し、これまで実証されてきた思考法や行動様式では対処することができない今日において、オルタナティブな視点や関わり方は、リアリティや私たちがいる場所にアプローチする新たな可能性を提案します。



When you open the door again, try looking outside with new eyes. See what changed. Smile.
もう一度扉を開けたとき、新しい目で外を眺めて。変わったものを見つけた?笑顔で。


The exhibition is part of (O)Kamemochi art collective’s ongoing project for exploring alternative methods of community building within the art world, insisting on mutual care, support, and friendship as core values of the common art-making and research process.

Within the project’s framework several co-learning events, focused on specific historical accounts on marginal communication and community, provide an additional opportunity for knowledge sharing and creating an atmosphere of support.                      
この展覧会は、アート・コレクティブ(O)Kamemochiが現在進めている、アート業界におけるコミュニティ形成のオルタナティブな方法を探求するプロジェクトの一環であり、共同でのアート制作・研究プロセスのコアバリューとして、相互ケア、サポート、友情関係を主張しています。

プロジェクトの中で、周縁化されたコミュニケーションとコミュニティに関する特定の歴史的記述に焦点を当てたいくつかのコラーニングイベントは、知識の共有と支援の雰囲気作りのための付加的な機会を提供します。





Additional Programs 



2024.05.31  (Fri・金)17:30 - 20:00
(reception opens 17:15)

Price: Free (recommended donation of 500yen)









Screening and Talk Event: The Night, Melek and Our Gang facilitated and organised by Osman Serhat Orta and Cleo Verstrepen

17:30    Screening with eng/jpn subtitles
“The Night, Melek and Our Gang” by Atif Yilmaz 
+
19:30    Talk in eng w/jpn support if needed         
Sema Cakmak (online) “Invisible and back again: Lubunca (as) practices of a queer/kuir counterpublic and film culture“ 

 Released in 1994, The Night, Melek and Our Gang (also translated as The Night, Angel and Our Children) portrays the lives of sex workers and the queer community in 1990s Istanbul - showing their daily struggles, loves and friendships stories. This film is one of the first to incorporate Lubunca, a “secret” queerspeak (or a slang) originating in Istanbul, and to depict life in Beyoğlu, the neighbourhood where the Lubunya community who have been using this slang  thrived before the disruption caused by continuous police brutality and gentrification. As such, it serves as a vital testimony and archive of the era's memories, which are now at risk of being erased. Following the screening, researcher Sema Çakmak will join us for a discussion about the film, its legacy, and Lubunca counterculture.

 Sema Çakmak is a PhD candidate in the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. She studied theatre and media studies, and French studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and cinema studies at the University Aix-Marseille. Her main research interests are queer cinema, festival studies and political film cultures.




2024.06.02(Sun・日)17:30 - 20:30
(reception opens 17:15)

Price: Free (recommended donation of 500yen)
الحركة اللاحركة (Non-movement Movement)
a performance lecture by Dima Abou Zannad

Artist Statement:
 My most recent work is born out of an interest in the different dimensionalities that work within language. In the context of my current projects, it is form, meaning and sound. Fundamentally, I am driven to make a mark. The content of which has lately revolved around the dynamic/static. 
 الحركة اللاحركة (non-movement movement) is a project that arose out of a need to contextualize staticness in language, guided by an interpretation of Arabic grammar. The project aims to touch upon the many landscapes a stream moves through. It involves the performance lecture of a linguistic study on relative motion through the word تدفق (tadaffuq)(stream). The performance alternates between processes of sense-making and meaning-making, guided by the movements of the throat in pronunciation and the morphology of the word, intertwined with a narrative that situates the linguistic study as a metaphor for a current state of paralysis.
 Here, I cannot help but touch upon the term struggle or نزاع–wherein the desire to move is negated by the force to still, and yet both agony and longing persist–making work out of the passage of time until relief.     

Dima Abou Zannad
 Dima Abou Zannad is an artist based in Sharjah, born in Beirut in 1999. Abou Zannad’s practice is primarily preoccupied with the Trace–especially as it presents itself within language. Her multidisciplinary process involves performing processes of deconstruction on language. Abou Zannad extracts, documents, and places language in its aesthetic literary form within view, reconfiguring it in the process. Her practice resonates with the literary style stream of consciousness, recognized in the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Clarice Lispector. 
 Abou Zannad’s practice began with negotiating longing, subdued and suppressed. Her process involves her tracing of a thread–or trail–of ‘feminine’ language where the desperate evocation of meaning is needed and desired. She is interested in exploring how language and its aesthetic form as text–and other–reveals the human compulsion to tell and be ‘told’. 






Organised by: Alissa Osada-Phornsiri
Co-organised by: (O)Kamemochi 
Cooperation: Datsuijo - (a) place to be naked 
Supported by Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture) 



主催:長田ポンシリ・アリサ
共催:(O)Kamemochi 
協力:脱衣所
助成:公益財団法人東京都歴史文化財団 アーツカウンシル東京[スタートアップ助成]