Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan.
Cheang has a particular knack for blending post-porn performance and cyberpunk science-fiction into films, as in her latest project 3x3x6 presented this year in Venice. Perhaps her pioneer work was I. Inspired by this venue, Cheang immediately decided to tackle the theme of incarceration. Before my first site visit, I did some research on the history of the prison, on the beautiful or cruel memory of the place, and I discovered that Casanova had been imprisoned there.
Then during that first visit, I thought it would also be good to go back to the panoptic interface that I used for Brandon. Cheang invited Paul B. Preciado to join her as associate curator. New apparatuses of control are made of a juxtaposition of multiple and often confronting technologies of production of subjectivity, which come from diverse historical regimes.
We are no longer analogical subjects of discipline but we are not yet fully modular digital beings of control. We are transitioning. Thereafter, they had the idea of highlighting 10 cases of imprisonment for sexual crimes.
The main room of the exhibition features 10 screens on which are projected the 10 films shot in 4K video that reinterpret in a queer and fluid manner the 10 defined typologies and often inversing genders, as when Sade is played by a woman, for example. She depicts not the Western icon of male heterosexuality but an image for the first sexual educator: a pioneer of safe sex , who went beyond the stereotypical differences between straight and queer sexuality.
