M HKA Ensembles

Other, 100 x 100 x 40 cm.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist.

Multidisciplinary artist Aay Liparoto (°1987, New Jersey, USA) traverses the boundaries of intimacy and bureaucracy. Seeking the tenderness with your identity card and the bureaucracy implicit in your friendships. The work touches on stories of everyday relationships with objects, people and social structures, whose power can be rendered invisible by daily interaction. Each governed by layers of laws, nostalgia and social history.

In their solo and collaborative practice Liparoto uses repetitive performative acts and creates scenarios along with workshops, videos and texts to audio visually unpick these everyday life relationships. Their methodology began with the 9 month long daily performance project Andrew has His Period (2014) and Andrew a Strong Courageous Warrior (2016), a seductive reaction on normative gender performance. Evolving further on a road trip across the USA with their mirror image to understand the nature of collaboration in We were Fools for Thinking it was going to be Fun (2019). Most recently the installation all bodies welcome | no bodies welcome (2020), questioning the need for queer bodies to consent online with an immersive co-written choral installation created in collaboration with HOT BODIES – Choir Brussels. They live and work in Brussels.

Not Proud Yet [ I – III ]

These appealingly grotesque mouldy remains of tea form a fragmented story of Section 28: An act that made it illegal for local governments in the United Kingdom to ‘promote homosexuality’. It was incited in 1987 and only fully abolished in 2005. This was the first anti-gay law created in the UK in 100 years, galvanized out of moral panic that affected a whole generation access to education and support. What is the embodied experience of state sanctioned homophobia? What are the new fears of moral corruption and new acts of political silencing?

This work is part of a larger project: Small Acts of Violence.
https://www.aliparoto.com