Aliza Shvarts: Purported

About

 Shvarts’ performance, video, installation and text-based practice explores reproductive labor and its biological and societal maintenance through queer and feminist understandings. Read against the current climate of renewed anti-abortion laws and activism against sexual violence, the exhibition brings together over a decade of the artist’s work, as well as newly commissioned work, that complexly questions the interrelated dynamics of gender, sexuality, consent and power as they play out inside contemporary culture. Shvarts famously drew widespread attention as an undergraduate student in 2008 when her Untitled [Senior Thesis], consisting of a yearlong performance of self-induced miscarriages, was declared a fiction by Yale University and banned from public exhibition. This work will be on view for the first time in New York at Art in General and frames the areas of inquiry Shvarts has consistently continued to explore throughout her practice: how the body means and matters and how the subject consents and dissents. One of the most important American feminist artists of her generation, this is her first solo exhibition in New York City.