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Opening, 31st May 2018 18H - 21H

With: Lionel Soukaz, Oreet Ashery, Beth Collar and Giles Round & archive materials from Pierre Klossowski & Pierre Zucca, Claude Faraldo, and the Bazooka group

Curated by Paul Clinton

Goswell Road at Balice Hertling, Belleville 

Exhibition May 31st - July 13th, 2018

Opening Hours, Tuesday to Saturday 11H - 19H

Can desire, freed of all restrictions, really dismantle society and capitalism? The answer was emphatically yes for many involved in May 1968 and the years of civil unrest that followed, which gave birth to the gay and women’s liberation movements in France. Family, morality and reproduction were seen as bourgeois and repressive by Marxists and sexual revolutionaries alike, with some declaring that it should be ‘forbidden to forbid’. This exhibition looks at a counter current of artists who, while remaining committed to ending oppression, question the idea that desire is an inherently revolutionary force waiting to be unleashed, or that sexual freedom will free all subjects equally. Alongside artists and filmmakers associated with that time, Pierre Klossowski, Pierre Zucca and Lionel Soukaz, will be recent work from Oreet Ashery, Beth Collar and Giles Round, which expresses ambivalence about liberation of many kinds. Just as the slogan ‘forbidden to forbid’ implies a contradiction – it’s a rule against rules, a prohibition against prohibitions – so too these artists tease out ironies in the idea of sexual liberation. - Paul Clinton

Goswell Road co-published A Goswell Reader with Balice Hertling alongside the show, which was Edited by Clinton. The redear features essays by Clinton previously published in Freize magazine, and a new essay for the publication. It also features an interview with Lionel Soukaz by Virgile Iscan, and an extract of a long essay by TJ Demos. 

Press:   

Exhibition Feature on Mousse Magazine

Review, Inferno Magazine

Review, La République de l'Art