Welcome to the six-channel version of The Gobernment. Please don’t be alarmed by the apparent titular mis-spelling. It’s intentional! The intrusive “b” condenses several key dimensions of Schulman’s exhibition-cum-art tv series: the multilingualism of cosmopolitan discourses (“v” is uttered as “b” in Spanish); the body’s wondrously elusive performances (nasal congestion’s highjacking of pronunciation); and deception (the strategic use of misspelling to evade online surveillance). In French, the language in which the project was initially developed, the verb “berner” means to deceive or delude, adding weight to this last reference.
The Gobernment asserts a speculative realm in which women defy the narrow phallocentricities of twentieth-century art to design their own expansive legacy. The work plunges us into a desiring and delirious world where the personal and the political draw artists together, creating webs of affect and inurgence that elude discipline, time, territory, and control. Episode 1 introduces this exhibition-cum-adventure while Episodes 2 to 6 buoy us, in and out of numerical order, into jostling stories of resistance where images, thoughts, languages, and sensations
converge. We encounter diverse forms of accommodation and living agreement along pathways of mobility and exile propelled by defiance.
Invented artistic movements and slippery confessions confront the ills of nationalism and totalitarianism. Today, Schulman’s narrative insistence on the self-determination of bodies and the irrepressibility of language in defiance of power is both compelling and urgent.