Review | Gender Talents: A Special Address by Ellen Feiss, Frieze Blog, March 4, 2013

March 10, 2013

“The ‘special’ mode of address offered by this symposium was acutely aware of its setting. Curated by Tate Film and Electra Productions and convened by the artist Carlos Motta, ‘Gender Talents’ was held in Tate Modern’s Tanks, that subterranean domain of the museum reserved for its most subversive offerings. The event itself was a one day conference as part of the series ‘Charming for the Revolution: A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness’ and was held in an installation by Motta, with speaker’s platforms and a foundation designed for seated panel discussion reminiscent of the environment he created for his 2011 exhibition ‘We Who Feel Differently’, at the New Museum. The audience was seated tightly around a central stage, with the darkened walls at the periphery of the room providing space for projections during each presentation. Somewhere between a TV studio (the dramatic lighting of The Weakest Link came to mind) and a TED Talk, emphasized by the participants’ headsets, the tightly curated scene of the symposium plainly addressed the construction of all public forums of knowledge exchange. This highlighted what would be one of the main considerations of the occasion: the tension between critical speech and its institutional framework…”

full text here