Fantasy_Of_Exit

The project “Fantasy of Exit” is the product of a cross-national collaboration between the artists Anja Khersonska (all pronouns), Gabriel Jeanjean (he/him), Jeanot Kempf (they/them) and their community circles. As a multimedia installation and through its collaborative nature, it explores the themes of identity and specifically gender through artistic research and experimentation, using concepts like glitch feminism, liminality and disidentification. In the context of an exhibition, it is presented as an installation with different parts, each of them highlighting a different artistic practice. The first part is the transformation of the exhibition space itself, inviting the visitors to become active participants through the immersive exhibition design and furniture that supports the engaging experience. The second part is a series of portraits of different individuals from Gabriel’s immediate community whom he reimagines as multi-layered animated models through his innovative use of 3D printing that creates an illusion of depth, movement and transformation when the portraits are viewed from different angles. The third part of the exhibit is an immersive experience created as a video game using the before-mentioned models as avatars. These avatars go through multiple horizontal levels of the game and are, again, transformed through its events. These are mainly text-driven and create narratives supported through level designs using the medium of collage and juxtaposition. The video game levels tell stories of challenge and catharsis, very personal accounts of queer resilience and both belonging in community and being pushed into an outsider position in mainstream culture, and finally, the fantasy of exit: the fantasy of escaping a homogenic suppressive society with a limited idea of identity comprised in an individual instead of a genderqueer and neuroqueer utopia.

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