Linz, Austria, 2014
Symposium / curatorial project / performances / workshops
University of Art and Design Linz
Porn, Trans and Artistic Practices was a symposium and curatorial project developed at the University of Art and Design Linz in collaboration with the Gender Studies Department, Gleichbehandlungsreferat, Kulturreferat, 5UHR Tee Dokapi, Dorf TV, and the Austrian National Students’ Union ÖH.
The project opened a space within the university for subjects that were often treated as excessive, marginal, or unsuitable for academic and artistic discussion: pornography, trans embodiment, sexual politics, queer intimacy, feminist desire, and the body as a site of representation, violence, pleasure, and resistance.
Across three weeks, the symposium brought together lectures, workshops, performances, screenings, discussions, and collective actions. It moved through photography, video, performance, theory, and public debate, asking how sexual identity and gender could be approached from feminist, pro-sex, queer, transfeminist, and post-pornographic perspectives.
Rather than treating pornography only as an object of moral critique, the symposium examined post-porn as a field of artistic and political production: a do-it-yourself culture of bodies, images, pleasure, dissent, and self-representation. The programme addressed orgasm and violence, the sexuality of older women, gender performativity, sexual violence, virtual sex, alternative maternities, orgasmic childbirth, queer politics, post-feminism, and the possibility of intimacy as a force of social and aesthetic transformation.
The project also questioned the limits of the feminist sexual subject. It asked what happens when feminist politics encounters bodies, desires, practices, and forms of representation that do not fit easily into inherited frameworks of respectability, victimhood, or liberation. In this sense, TransPorno treated sexuality not as a private matter, but as a contested public field where images, norms, institutions, and bodies are negotiated.
The discussions were situated within a broader constellation of post-porn, queer, post-feminist, and transfeminist practices, including DIY sexual cultures, post-porn festivals, feminist pornography, crip sexuality, and self-representational image-making. References included Diana J. Torres / Pornoterrorismo, Yes, We Fuck!, Post-Op, Annie Sprinkle, Emilie Jouvet, Maria Beatty, Tejal Shah, Bruce LaBruce, Julia Ostertag, Go Fist Foundation, Virginie Despentes, Shu Lea Cheang, Barbara DeGenevieve, Tim Stüttgen, Beatriz Preciado / Paul B. Preciado, Belladonna, among others.
My role included principal investigator, co-curator, producer, editor of reflective texts, and main communication contact for the symposium. The programme included two conferences, one workshop, four public activities, and seven performances. Participants and contributors included Dr. Phil. Herbert Hechmayer, Didi Bruckmayr, María Llopis, Angelika Peroni, gula gula, DJ X Glow, Tamara Máscara, Roland Laimer, Jens Höffken, Ursula Graber & Vilte Svarplyte, and KEOS.
The symposium contributed to the establishment of a theoretical course on post-pornographic practices within the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Art and Design Linz in 2015, extending the project’s impact beyond the event itself and into the university’s academic and student community.
