Juliana Huxtable,

Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream

25 January 2023 — 11 June 2023

Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève proudly presents the group exhibition Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream (Chrysalide : le rêve du papillon), devoted to the transformations that occur within us as well as outside of us. Life itself is subject to constant change, to a constant state of ephemeral, unstable flux. Its incessant reconfigurations began long before the emergence of humans and will continue long into the future.

Chrysalis pays homage to the world’s never-ending metamorphosis and all its organic (and inorganic) inhabitants. The exhibition explores the concept of mutability from a wide range of different formal, existential, and political angles. Each thing, each image, and each form in this exhibition is in flux—shifting from one state to another, becoming something else, cycling through multiple identities.

The individuals present here—as well as the plants and inorganic substances—become receptacles of these multiple identities. They form polyptychs, anthropomorphic and botanical sculptures that intertwine in a relentless rhythm of transformation, like a shapeshifting coral reef caught up in its own ceaseless mutation. There are no fixed images in this exhibition, no immutable lines or insuperable boundaries. Everything vibrates and quickens under the pressure of an inescapable intrinsic necessity: transformation.

Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream addresses the triumphant and liberating aspects of change while raising complex, sensitive, and even rather painful, questions. “This constant tension between joy and tragedy, between pleasure and pain, runs through the entire exhibition and forms its backbone, its most intimate narrative,” explains Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. “Visitors will fully immerse themselves in the great adventure of metamorphosis, in the palpable experience of a changing world that invites us to change too, to develop our beliefs and our views of things.”

Chrysalis marks the major project of 2023 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. With some sixty artists and over two hundred works, including loans from the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, it will also feature a special lineup of performance art, screenings, a special music program and concerts. An exhibition dedicated to design will then take over the exhibition spaces during the summer, with works by Théophile Blandet and Audrey Large, extending the main themes of Chrysalis through the prism of materiality. This project will be co-curated with BRH+ (Barbara Brondi & Marco Rainò).

Rounding out the exhibition, a richly illustrated bilingual catalogue (in French and English) by Lenz Press will include an essay by Andrea Bellini and contributions by a number of curators, critics, artists, philosophers, and scholars on themes related to metamorphosis.

Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream is a project curated by Andrea Bellini.
Curatorial advisors: Sarah Lombardi and Sara De Chiara.
In collaboration with Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.

Juliana Huxtable

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Huxtable is concerned with the way in which marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’. Hinged on empathy, desire and agile distortion as a political and social paradigm, Huxtable’s motive re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human’. Her works pool together references from science fiction, queer nightlife, Internet subcultures, folklore, fetishes and Furry fandom, into portrayals of intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as a method of resistance and liberation.

In 2022, Project Native Informant presented AKIMBO SPITTLE. In the exhibition, Huxtable places her own body at the centre of mythologising scenes; the printed and overpainted canvases set against hallucinogenic landscapes render her figures half human, half animal.

Huxtable’s recently opened solo exhibition HEADS & TAILS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ICONICITY presented the artist with the opportunity to broaden the cast of characters populating the canvases. From the exploration of her own image in the previous show, Huxtable here takes the work a step further; an exercise in world building if you will, resulting in a universe of her own creation.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. In the same year, MUMOK and Huxtable published Life: A Novel, a collaborative science-fiction narrative with artist Hannah Black.

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hayward Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others.

Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.

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