UPCOMING - Deconsecrated | DAC - Decentralised Art Club , Ghent

2023 Date tbc

I N F E M S - I n t e r s e c t i o n a l F e m i n i s t A r t C o l l e c t i v e

c o m e s t o Ghent @ DAC

Art Exhibition: Deconsecrated

InFems @Decentralized Art Club Schoolstraat 14, 9040 Gent, Belgium

InFems art collective presents ‘Deconsecrated’ with Decentralized art Club at their off site location at Campo Santo Ghent burial ground chapel.

Deconsecrated draws inspiration from the site, a deconsecrated chapel in Ghent and nearby graveyard, and from the city’s three Beguinages (Catholic communities established in the Middle Ages of single women living, austerely, chastely, together).

There’s a vacant altar in this secular space. The ghost of a woman cast out into the wilderness, naked like Eve. Or a penitent Mary Magdalene with hair that spills about her shoulders or grows, abject, until it covers her entire body. Or another kind of idol: a Hollywood movie star, elevated to an impossible being, just so that she can be worshipped, even if this means erasing her identity. Patriarchy prefers to reward the virginal, chaste or maternal female body with a kind of consecrating idealisation.

But even the beguines arouse suspicion for being too self-sufficient. What is it about a group of women that scares men so? There’s an invasion in here:  women who refuse to submit, who demand what of the deconsecrated female body? The desacralised woman? The demonic Liliths, the beguiling Delilahs luring you into their mirrored web. The witches who weaken their victims with a look, who sit on monks as they sleep and steal their seed. What unclean rituals will they perform now? What shape-shifting miracles? What sacrifices? Fearful, men persecute them. Defiant, the women resist. 

Deconsecrated celebrates the slide from sacred to profane, from saint back to sinner. Whose blood will be shed on the way?