Closing Reception with Reading: SERIOUS PLEASURES Mary Katharine Tramontana

About

Mary Katharine Tramontana

SERIOUS PLEASURES

Closing with reading, cocktails, + music📗
Wednesday, 8 January 2025, 7pm🍸
JERGON, Wrangelstr. 76, 10997 Berlin📷

Or by appointment.

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"In Mary Katharine Tramontana’s Serious Pleasures poetry is hyper-explicit—both sensual and intellectual—and in that sense closest to Pasolini’s destruction and reaffirmation of poetic sublimation. Her poetics of submission give the reader the option of experiencing subjecthood in either position." Toni Hildebrant, co-editor of PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher 

Against the backdrop of a new era of sexual regression across the political spectrum, Tramontana’s poetry and photography remind us that sex is a fundamental way of being human. Reclaiming her eroticism from her Catholic upbringing and global, secular anti-female sexuality dogma, her corporeal self-portraits and photography series of young bisexual men, Boys (2023-ongoing), offer a queer perspective on art history’s legacy of the male artist desiring the female body. 

"The disciplining mechanisms of misogyny vary from country to country, but one consistent tenet is that a woman’s value is determined by how hard it is to fuck her. I wanted to create a body of work purely for my gratification," Tramontana said. "As a poet, I’m in a submissive position to my desire. As a photographer, I intentionally objectify my male subjects in a power play that excites us both—they like that I am fully clothed while they’re in a state of undress—but I refer to them as my subjects. The process of our shared spontaneous attention in this moment of social media commodification—Simone Weil said, 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity'—is just as vital to me as the portrait."

"Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing" is writer (New York Times, Esquire) and artist Mary Katharine Tramontana’s debut collection of poetry, accompanied by original photography. The collection began as a letter she wrote to seduce an incapacitating on-again off-again lover—a glamorous and mysterious Milanese neighbour.

Mary Katharine Tramontana (b. 1982, US) is a Berlin-based artist, poet, and writer whose work on sexual politics and art has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, the Guardian, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s collaborated with Reina Sofía, the Spanish Film Archive, WILZIG Museum, Arsenal Institute, and Academy of Arts Berlin, among others. In the past year, she’s exhibited photography in five shows in Miami, Berlin, and Savannah, and given several talks on sexuality and culture. The recipient of a Frieze bursary, she’s also worked as a sex research assistant at Kinsey Institute. This spring she’ll be in residence at Villa Lena to write her first non-fiction book co-written with Erika Lust and published in English, French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, and German.