Marking 20 years since artist, author and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her house, Gropius Bau presents the primary complete solo exhibition of her work in Germany. In her expansive oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counterculture and resistance meets need. “Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt” holds the complete scope of Ms. Davis’ follow, whereas additionally giving heart stage to her many collaborative initiatives, with the Berlin-based artwork collective CHEAP and New York-based artist Jonathan Berger, amongst many others. Vaginal Davis’ work in portray, video and movie, zine-making, writing, music and efficiency extends throughout the bottom flooring of Gropius Bau. Spanning from 1985 to 2025, it’s introduced in seven large-scale installations.
“After internet hosting her first institutional exhibition in Berlin in 2019, we’re thrilled to welcome Vaginal Davis again at Gropius Bau and provides her the stage she deserves with the primary complete solo present in Germany, that includes works from over 5 many years. In her creative follow, she has all the time rejected and disrupted conventional classes and conventions in artwork. We’ll begin our spring programme on this punk spirit and proceed to discover our imaginative and prescient: rethinking what an exhibition area could be—and whom it’s for.”
—Jenny Schlenzka, Director of Gropius Bau
Vaginal Davis is a residing murals: a performer, author and creator of iconic zines; a visible artist, experimental filmmaker; a self-proclaimed Blacktress and drag terrorist, a gossip columnist, influential socialite, educator and countercultural renegade. For the reason that late Seventies, her oeuvre has pushed the boundaries of artwork, music and efficiency. Impressed by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the US, she named herself after feminist and Black Energy activist Angela Davis, who additionally has a really particular relationship to Berlin.
Early punk period
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Vaginal Davis grew to become a founding mom of the town’s queer punk underground scene within the Nineteen Eighties. Ms. Davis began a band referred to as Afro Sisters within the late Seventies (who would ultimately open for Completely happy Mondays and The Smiths), adopted by different bands, together with ¡Cholita! The Feminine Menudo (with Alice Bag), the velocity steel thrash band Pedro, Muriel and Esther (PME, produced by Steve Albini) in addition to black fag (with Bibbe Hansen, produced by Kim Gordon and Beck). Vaginal Davis grew to become integral to the scene known as “homocore”, which parodied and challenged the white heterosexual bias of punk and refused the normative method of the homosexual mainstream. Ms. Davis created her personal mythology—an interaction between dis/identification, fiction and social critique – throughout the stay performances of what she referred to as her “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands. She unfold the phrase throughout artwork and music networks via her self-published zines, and earlier than lengthy, she was taking part in to a rising viewers on the levels of night time golf equipment and punk venues.
Counterculture typology
Amidst the onset of the AIDS epidemic, when LGBTQIA+ rights barely existed, Ms. Davis created a radical different for each punk and queer politics, and people residing outdoors of mainstream society. In her personal phrases, Vaginal Davis was “too homosexual for the punk scene and too punk for the gays”. She grew to become the embodiment of the essentially disruptive and destabilizing “terrorist drag”, pairing pleasure with resistance as she championed anti-normative, anti-capitalist and pro-punk aesthetics. From the notorious HAG gallery (1982–89) to band initiatives, Xerox-printed fanzines and edgy artwork occasions, Ms. Davis’ initiatives grew to become the speak of the city and ultimately legendary. Membership Sucker (1994–99) – her Sunday afternoon punk and efficiency artwork membership in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood – was a novelty, giving a stage to up-and-coming artists, bands, performers and weirdos of the LA artwork and underground scene, internet hosting a various and unconventional crowd. Quickly, she grew to become a muse and inspiration to the likes of choreographer Pina Bausch, dressmaker Rick Owens and artists Wu Tsang and Catherine Opie, and had a big affect on the riot grrrl scene.
“Every little thing that’s culturally fascinating and attention-grabbing on this planet originated within the Black queer demimonde, then will get tailored by the Black straight populace, then co-opted into dominant or common tradition.”
— Vaginal Davis
Berlin
In 2005, following frequent collaboration with Berlin-based artwork collective CHEAP, Ms. Davis packed her baggage and relocated to the German capital. Right here, she continues to be an important contributor and organiser throughout cultural fields, from worldwide instructing positions and transdisciplinary initiatives to exhibiting her work in varied contexts. She has been curating and internet hosting the movie sequence Rising Stars, Falling Stars at Arsenal—Institute for Movie and Video Artwork e. V. since 2007. In her personal unforgettable approach, she presents uncommon movies, classics and gems, and has revealed a reader containing most of her fascinating introductory texts. Between Ms. Davis’ condominium within the west and her studio within the japanese a part of the town, she continues to seek out inspiration within the texture of the German capital.
“My Berlin idols are the genius filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, the late, nice Birgit ‘I Will Make You Sweat’ Hein and her ex-husband, the experimental movie guru Wilhelm Hein. Berlin is gorgeous however bleak, similar to its official sister metropolis, Los Angeles. I don’t thoughts the Berlin ‘distance’ conundrum. I admire that you simply all the time know the place you stand right here with folks. There’s not one of the compelled familiarity and niceties that Los Angeles is understood for as a banal leisure trade hub. Give me Berlin’s cloudy gray skies and grumpy Norberty bluntness any day of the week.”
—Vaginal Davis
The exhibition
“Fabelhaftes Produkt” is made up of seven main installations, folding in histories that occurred on numerous levels, in vibrant nightclubs and condominium galleries, unfold far and extensive via the xeroxed pages of her zines and intensive correspondences, anchored in each LA and Berlin. The installations stage Ms. Davis’ archive anew, reinterpreting the actions of her creative follow and, in so doing, drawing connections to burning questions as we speak.
One such instance is the Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome (2024), an set up named after Ms. Davis’ cousin, Carla “Maddog” DuPlantier of the band The Controllers, who launched her to the LA punk scene. Taking over the enduring Sixties structure of the Cinerama Dome on LA’s Sundown Boulevard, Ms. Davis’ set up hosts a number of of her early movies. A few of them showcase the artist’s position within the LA queer underground scene, mirrored via recordings of her iconic punk live shows and nightclub occasions from the Nineties. These works are introduced alongside a collection of supplies from her huge archive.
In a lot of Ms. Davis’ work, social commentary emerges in a whimsical, offbeat fashion: In her no-budget video That Fertile Feeling (1983), Vaginal Davis and Fertile La Toyah Jackson co-star as two girls on the fringe of society. Initially rejected from movie festivals and by now thought of a cult traditional, the work focuses a essential lens on US-American society and the restricted entry to healthcare throughout the spectrum of race, gender and sophistication. Her touchstone movie The White to be Indignant (1999), challenges constructions and wishes round white supremacist tradition, providing a pointy picture of the US and right-wing extremism – tackling a subject that is still related as we speak.
The set up HAG – small, modern, haggard (2012-24) is a tribute to and impressed by the unique HAG Gallery, which Ms. Davis opened in her former condominium at 7850 Sundown Boulevard in Hollywood, California in 1982. Over its seven years of existence, HAG introduced work principally by people who didn’t think about themselves artists and who didn’t go to artwork faculty, from musicians like Alice Bag and Colleen Pancake to actors like John Drew Barrymore and Holly Woodlawn. At Gropius Bau, HAG options Ms. Davis’ signature cosmetics-and-tempera work of “girls trapped within the our bodies of girls”, wallpaper collages of lesbian domesticity and totemic bread sculptures – all work that Ms. Davis has made in Berlin.
The Depraved Pavilion (2021) takes the guests additional into Vaginal Davis’ universe. Within the so-called Fantasia Library, she creates a self-portrait of herself as a author, whereas additionally exhibiting her literary lineage in a pantheon of femme writers. Within the Tween Bed room, Ms. Davis reveals herself via the wishes and fantasies of a tween lady, with a human-sized dildo in a rotating mattress because the centrepiece. And naturally, every part is Josephine Baker-pink. Within the set up Bare on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat (2024-25), Vaginal Davis highlights her life-long fascination with writer Frank L. Baum and illustrator John R. Neill’s 13-volume Oz sequence in a brand new multi-media work made in collaboration with artist Jonathan Berger.
Subsequent, the set up HOFPFISTEREI showcases Ms. Davis’ writing follow, from her years as a teen correspondent in Los Angeles and her groundbreaking zines, to her mature years as a “friction author”. That includes a variety of genres—from poetry to long-format journalism to fabricated confessional literature and tabloid gossip columns—the presentation mirrors Ms. Davis’ dynamic leaps between downtown nightlife, educational lectures and gallery settings. The various codecs on show level to the assorted avenues of dissemination and circulation Ms. Davis has employed over the many years, all of which paved the best way for numerous digital iterations of self-publishing. Talking from the Diaphragm, Ms. Davis’ long-running on-line diary, was conceived within the early days of the web, earlier than the existence of running a blog on pre-coded platforms.
CHEAP
Within the last set up, the Berlin-based artwork collective CHEAP presents the video, sound and object set up Select Mutation, with pictures by Annette Frick (idea by Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel and Martin Siemann). The featured video, additionally titled Select Mutation, combines discovered and unique footage in a dystopian collage about paranoia and the consequences of social and political management on language and the physique. Its title is impressed by author and thinker Paul B. Preciado’s 2020 article Studying from the Virus, by which he displays on the political dimensions of diseases, immunity and group. Video, sound and objects set up are accompanied by 9 larger-than-life-sized black and white pictures by Annette Frick, that includes portraits of CHEAP from a few of their earliest initiatives, together with CHEAP Klub.
The artwork collective CHEAP was based in Berlin in 2001. CHEAP’s work consists of performances, movies, festivals, live shows, installations and radio reveals. In any format, their follow combines principle and pleasure, politics and whimsy, aesthetics and intercourse. The collective regularly collaborates with artists from totally different disciplines, corresponding to Jonathan Berger, Bruce LaBruce, Pola Sieverding and Xiu Xiu. Ms. Davis has labored with the group from its early days, first as a visitor, then as a vital collective member.
at Gropius Bau, Berlin
till September 14, 2025
