#VIRTUALARTIM: ANONYMOUS CHAT #1 WITH NATIG ASGAR AND LAURA IGE

YARAT Contemporary Art Space announces the first anonymous virtual chat on the topic “Trendy #Queerness” with artists Natig Asgar and Laura Ige as part of the exhibition “I might be staring at infinity (or the backs of my own eyelids)” at Virtual ARTIM project space. 

Date: 25 June, 2020

Time: 19:00 (Baku time)

Artists: Laura Ige & Natig Asgar

Moderator: Zahra Mammadova

Language: English and Azerbaijani

Location: Virtual ARTIM project space

For enter to the virtual exhibition you need to download the program from the link:

Windows: https://bit.ly/3dJ8yGf

Mac: https://bit.ly/3h4BElj

Have you ever experienced discrimination due to your gender or sexual orientation?
Is that the reason why you do not dare to go out on the street?
People who do not fit into the social grid of gender conceptions live in a permanent state of quarantine because they cannot be who they really are in the outside world. The other extreme is the non-binary gender movement, which mutates to a superficial trend and suppresses any discussion about gender distinctions. Is there a middle ground between these two extremes?

Natig Asgar (b.1993, Azerbaijan) graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Baku State University in 2015 and participated in YARAT Academy in 2018 (spring session). Natig is a non-binary performer and fashion designer who works with photography and video and creates garments. The underlying concepts of Natig's artworks deal with gender identification issues. Mostly, the artworks are self-portraits, which is a search and study of Natig’s own personality and a rejection of social norms and roles as a common rule.

Laura Ige (b. 1985, Argentina) has a degree in Fine Arts from Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Buenos Aires and most recently, she completed an MA in Fine Arts in the MAPS Program, Arts in Public Spheres –summa cum laude- at Édhéa, Sierre, Switzerland. Laura Ige’s fields of experimentation are visual arts, sound art and writing about popular, digital and underground culture with regard to the disembodiment/deconstruction of female identities in the digital realm. The relationship between games, lifestyle, social media and their transposition into the real/everydayness, neosexualities and the deconstruction of the human in porn, the technology of love, the commodification of identity as a performance, and the performativity of the virtual identity are the basis of her research.

Virtual Anonymous Chat

The anonymous chat creates a room for discussion inside the virtual exhibition “I might be staring at Infinity” with a group of people who can hide their real identify through virtual avatars and thus speak their opinion freely without any inhibition. The purpose of the chat is to hold a series of informal, discussion-like events about contradicting and intriguing social topics related to ongoing debates in the art world. The secret meetings involve one or two artists with a moderator guiding the discussion.

If you wish to participate in the discussions, please follow the link for registration and fill in the questionnaire and push SUBMIT ANSWERS button.

Questions and application in AZE https://bit.ly/3daVuZe

Questions and application in ENG https://bit.ly/3eeC8Ui

*Please note that the number of participants is limited and you need to subscribe before 24^th of June to be able to participate.