Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Joseph Liatela, On Being an Idea (the right to live without permission) (installation view) (2020). 126 pounds of DSM-IV-TR textbooks formerly used by students, shibari hemp rope, LED lights, and MDF, 74 × 37 × 34 inches. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artist and ICA LA. Photo: Jeff McLane.

In a world of raging anti-trans animus, where so many are working so feverishly to cement a flat stereotype of us as fearsome predators and tragic victims, the intersectional breadth, multiplicity, and specificity of trans voices, aesthetics, and thought brought together in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ (ICA LA) Scientia Sexualis hit like medicine. Yowling trans rage sits beside howls of trans humor and pleasure. Wails of trans grief slip into yips of kink-fueled, imperfect liberation. Pulling its title from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), a canonical text that critically examines the development of Western conceptions of sex and sexuality, Scientia Sexualis brings together work from 28 multidisciplinary artists refusing simplistic, colonial, and cis-heteronormative ways of thinking and feeling about art, science, and sex.

These works play off of each other, longing for each other’s complications—like wrestlers on a sticky floor that struggle and groan together but come up bloody and smiling at the end of the match. Joseph Liatela’s funny and defiant On Being an Idea (the right to live without permission) (2020) presents a stack of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV (1994) books—the last edition to list gender identity “disorder” as a mental illness.¹ The books are tied up in shibari knots like a bound submissive longing for release in restraint and liberation in surrender. P. Staff’s performative Depollute (2018) also plays with the power dynamics of doctor/ patient and artist/viewer, requiring visitors to ask museum staff to turn on the work, only to be greeted with a strobing video describing the precise steps to carry out self-castration. Nicki Green’s ritual bath/urinal triptych/trans fountain installation Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain (2024) explores related themes of (de)pollution and transformation. But Green’s dripping vessels, inscribed with delicate drawings of her mythic Androgynes bathing, offer absolution and transformation through water and reworked purity ritual. Instead of familiar tropes rooted in personal vulnerability, the works in Scientia Sexualis offer some bondage rope, a mirror, a vibrator, a basin of water, a knife, and an invitation onto the wrestling mat.

Demian DinéYazhi’s mural POZ since 1492 (2016/2024) welcomes visitors to the exhibition with a body slam of poetic confrontation. The mural depicts a painting of the “First Thanksgiving,” colorized in blue and green like a film negative, behind the work’s title emblazoned in floor-to-ceiling graphic text. Installed across an entire wall of the museum’s courtyard entrance, the mural forces visitors to think of coloniality as virus, as infection, as disease. This confrontation sets the stage for all of Scientia Sexualis by reminding us, before we set foot inside the galleries, that colonialism and its cis-heteronormativity continue to infect us all.

Jes Fan’s large, looping video projection Xenophoria (2018–20) joins DinéYazhi’s Indigenous defiance of cisheteronormativity with more-than-human autonomy. Fan’s video of writhing, crumbling, and twirling bodies and body parts offers viewers a taste of what trans theorist McKenzie Wark calls “xeno-euphoria”— the ecstatic experience of dissolution and multiplicity that happens when moving inside a swarm of entangled, “pretty,” yet “strange” bodies and body parts.² We do not want to touch the ambiguous tentacle flesh and cover ourselves in its inky melanin because it belongs to us or originated in our bodies—we want it because it is strange and wet and writhing. We do not desire the black powder scraped from the amorphous fleshy fungus because it is familiar and understood. We want to touch it because we are curious, and we want to feel and know the unknown.

Other works center the horror of bodies cut up without consent. KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner)’s gruesome Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016) literalizes the history of J. Marion Sims’ forced medical experiments on enslaved Black women, confronting the viewer with a sutured-up silicone relic of butchered brown, pink, and yellow pelvic flesh inside a mirrored case. Candice Lin’s Night Moon (2024) requires viewers to kneel in front of a violently truncated ceramic pelvis modeled on an eighteenth-century anatomist’s illustration. From this position, viewers can peer through a vaginal hole to watch a tiny stop-action video of flying genitals and cannibalism. When the gallery is quiet, viewers can hear a series of howls, like a call to the moon or a feral, primal scream. These howls are a fitting soundtrack to the whole exhibition and the rising anti-trans-neofascist- MAGA-2.0 moment in American history. If, as philosophers Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Luce deLire have argued, subaltern postcolonial and transsexual subjects cannot really “speak” in the language of our oppression,³ then perhaps the howl could be our shared language.

The howl can hold the multi-vocal complexity of the past and present, just like this exhibition. It can hold the pain and grief of generations of queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous people who have suffered abuse in the name of science and colonial “progress.” It can hold the growling rumbles of artists sublimating that pain into cathartic rage and defiant disobedience. It can hold the xeno-euphoria that comes when we let ourselves get lost in the churning tangle of growling, dancing, grieving, laughing, dripping bodies on the wrestling mat. Not mine or yours, but ours. As a form of speech, the howl defies the cis-heteronormative, colonial logics of control that demand legibility and transparency. But it is not mere noise. The howl is a chorus for the howlers and those who may join them, like a battle cry or a Bacchanalian incitation for the long night ahead.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Nicki Green, Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain (installation view) (2024). Site-specific installation with glazed ceramic, hardware, and water, dimensions variable. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artist and ICA LA. Photo: Jeff McLane.