The Porn Identity. Expeditionen in die Dunkelzone.

Porn is, so they say, what you do not want to be caught with, or at. And yet it is everywhere. Pornography has infiltrated the mainstream and is booming in the niches. It pervades everyday life, pop, and the arts. “Pornetration” is flooding the media, which themselves, in their voyeuristic character and greed for signs of excitement, operate in a latently pornographic manner – always on the search for taboos that may be exhausted, broken, and nevertheless maintained at the same time. With artists investigating the relationship between power, gaze, and body in regard to pornographic scenarios, “post-pornographic” counter-images to sexism and hetero-normative screw reviews have recently mobilized in the slipstream of the porn Oscars’ stale glamour. The Porn Identity confronts the proliferation of pornography with motion pictures, sculptures, and installation works reflecting sexual desire. The transfer of indecent pictures into the art institutional space not only transcends the porn-typical context of market-oriented publication and reprivatized consumption, but also explores the similarities and differences between art and the visual culture of stimulation.