Lucas Odahara presents CFGNY 'Certain Forgotten Gestures Near Yourself'

About

In english, part of „Park Platz“ and Berlin Art Week

Lucas Odahara’s work "Os Desorientes da Pantera", inspired by "O Baile da Pantera Gay", a gay ball that existed in Rio Branco, Brazil, between 1986 and 1992, will be activated in a performance by the collective CFGNY at the Berlinische Galerie on September 15th. The platform designed by the artist and installed between the museum's parking lot and the public sidewalk, will be used as a stage. As a space of disorientation between inside and outside, private and public, west and east. The collaboration is a tribute to bodies on the run, who must keep moving outside conventional orientation systems.  

In a new performance, CFGNY imagines what it means to inhabit a bootleg identity. Moving beyond the need for the expression of authenticity, the performance explores the benefits of an identity unmoored from absolutes and revels in the joy and playfulness that can be found in the ungraspable. Using stand-ins, doubles, and transformations to create a space of distortion, the collective questions notions of seeing and visibility to open a discourse of potentiality.

CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York / Cute Fucking Gay New York) began in 2016 as an ongoing dialogue between Tin Nguyen and Daniel Chew on the intersections of fashion, race, identity and sexuality. Joined by Kirsten Kilponen and Ten Izu in 2020, CFGNY continually returns to the term ‘vaguely Asian’: an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other. CFGNY does not wish to represent what it means to be ‘Asian’ in the singular; instead, it encourages the visualization of the countless ways one is able to be in the plural. Recent presentations include Auto Italia, London (2021), X Museum, Beijing (2020), Etage Projects, Copenhagen (2020), RISD Museum, Providence (2019), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018), 47 Canal, New York (2017).

Lucas Odahara (*1989 São Paulo, Brazil) studied Product Design at the State University of São Paulo, then Digital Media and Fine Arts at the University of the Arts (HFK) in Bremen. His work has been seen at many exhibitions, including: Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (2020); Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan (2019); Schwules Museum, Berlin (2017); NUDA magazine, Stockholm (2017); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2016); Weserburg Bremen (2015) and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2015). He has been a DAAD scholar and in 2019 he won the Urban Design Prize awarded by the Senator for Culture in Bremen. He lives in Berlin.