Vaginal Davis
Magnificent Product
18.5 – 13.10 2024
Stockholm
Buy ticket
Adult: 150 SEK
Senior/student: 120 SEK
Annual Pass: 375 SEK
Free admission for those 18 and under and Klubb Moderna
Audio guide
Get in-depht knowledge about the works in ”Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product”.
Audio guide: Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product
Artist talk
Meet Ms. Davis for a once-in-a-lifetime, not-be-missed, all-the-tea-spilled conversation with Moderna Museet curator Hendrik Folkerts.
Catalogue
The exhibitions that together form “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product” are accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
The catalogue includes new texts on Ms. Davis’s work by Bojana Kunst, Hendrik Folkerts, Lia Gangitano, Elizabeth Leibovici, and Troizel X, as well as a collection of letters from colleagues, concubines, and co-conspirators, including Jonathan Berger, Darby English, Ricardo Montez, Tavia Nyong’o, Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Lisa Teasley.
Welcome to the wondrous world of Vaginal Davis. In this “magnificent product”, which unfolds at Moderna Museet and other art institutions in Stockholm, you are invited to see Ms. Davis’s expansive practice from all angles. – Hendrik Folkerts, Curator
Once upon a time, in the far-eastern part of Los Angeles, a little girl was born. Her name was Vaginal. She was a child prodigy: she could read when she was two, soon learned to speak five languages including Assyrian, graced the stage of numerous elementary school theatres, enrolled in the local genius honours program, and, at the tender age of eight years, mounted her first exhibition at the Los Angeles Public Library, a radical rethinking of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz”.
Vaginal came out as Black at the age of eighteen. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers in the United States, Vaginal named herself after Angela Davis — forever cementing her name in the annals of history: Vaginal Davis.
PERFORMANCE EVENTS IN SEPTEMBER
MDT (Moderna Dansteatern)
4 September 2024
Together with My Wild Flag dance and performance festival, we are bringing Vaginal Davis’s cinerama movie experience to MDT! Please join Ms. Davis for an annotated screening of Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” (1979) and Miloš Forman’s “Hair” (1979) on September 4.
Read more and get ticket: MDT (Moderna Dansteatern)
Tensta Konsthall
7 September 2024
The Vaginal Davis Universitet for the Damaged and Gifted stages a festival with performances, lecturinas, workshops, readings, screenings, meals, and more than a few surprises over the course of a full day at Tensta konsthall.
Read more: The Vaginal Davis Universitet for the Damaged and Gifted
Nationalmuseum
12 september 2024
Meet comic book artist and podcaster Liv Strömquist and journalist Henrik Torehammar in a conversation about ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and what makes the children’s book classic and film adaptation so relevant today. The beloved story is an important source of inspiration for Vaginal Davis’ current exhibition “Naked on my Ozgoad” at Nationalmuseum.
Read more and get ticket: Liv Strömquist & Henrik Torehammar in a conversation about “The Wizard of Oz”
Accelerator
14 September 2024
Between club nights and an art installation, CHEAP presents films, slides, lecturinas and music (by Xiu Xiu and others) in an exhausted performance about their political and private joys. Stop looking for that special someone. Enter their world where a whole proliferation of ways of connecting with others opens up.
With: Vaginal Davis, Daniel Hendrickson, Christian Fritzenwanker, Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, Martin Siemann and Annette Frick.
Read more: CHEAP: A World Where Nothing Is Private
In the late 1970s, she started a band called The Afro Sisters, followed by other punk bands including ¡Cholita!; Pedro, Muriel & Esther; and black fag. Vaginal Davis made a scene, referred to by flannel-wearing scholars as “homocore,” a movement that refused the lame game of the gay mainstream and created a radical alternative for many a freak and misfit. Children and innocent white boys were advised to stay inside, as Vaginal Davis played to stars and plebeians alike on the stages of night clubs, gay bars, and punk pits. Even then, Vaginal Davis understood the path to world domination:
“Everything that is culturally fascinating and interesting in the world originated in the Black queer demimonde then gets adapted by the Black straight populace, then co-opted into dominant or popular culture.”
Vaginal Davis did not stop there. She would go on to become a published author, award-winning blacktress, visual artist, temple prostitute, drag terrorist, celebrated film and documentary maker, cult figure, international superstar, spokesmodel, gossip columnist, influential socialite, and foundational performance artist.
She also moved to Berlin in the mid-2000s, where she made another scene, merging Los Angeles punk with Berlin radical. The Gospel of Vaginal Davis is now preached in every church, school, and queer club, from bustling metropoles to peaceful villages.
At Moderna Museet, Vaginal Davis metabolizes her own history with three major installations. First, “The Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome”, which holds four of Ms. Davis’s films from the 1980s and 1990s: “That Fertile Feeling” (1983), “Cholita!” (1995), “The White to be Angry” (1999), and “The Last Club Sucker” (1999). Together, they show Ms. Davis as a founding mother of Los Angeles’s punk “homocore” scene.
The second installation is “HAG – small, contemporary, haggard”. Initially conceived as Ms. Davis’s apartment gallery on 7850 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, California (1982-1989). “HAG” hosts numerous works by Ms. Davis: a suite of paintings of “women trapped in the bodies of women”; an installation of “lesbian domesticity wallpaper”; and two totemic sculptures made of bread, “Dirty Mariah (Lower Mesopotamia 40 BC)” and “Timberlake”, described by Ms. Davis as “Rapa Nui Moai monuments vs. the Venus of Willendorf.”
In the final room you are invited to step into “The Wicked Pavilion”, where, in the form of a library and a tween bedroom, Vaginal Davis brings together the icons, celebrated and forgotten, that populate her universe, through a dazzling installation of over 500 books, over forty paintings, and numerous handbag sculptures, not to mention a sampling of her blog avant-la-lettre “Speaking From the Diaphragm: The Vaginal Davis Blog (…From the Counsel of Inter-Continental Balistic Principalities with over 15,000,000 Followers and Subscribers)”.
But we do not stop there. “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product” also takes place at partner institutions in Stockholm, including Accelerator, Stockholm University, Index – Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art, MDT (Moderna Dansteatern), Nationalmuseum, and Tensta Konsthall — with each venue highlighting a different part of Vaginal Davis’s work.
After all, it takes a whole city to welcome a star of the caliber of Vaginal Davis.
Nationalmuseum
17 May–20 October 2024
We highlight Ms. Davis’s painting practice as well as her life-long fascination with Oz in a new installation in the Nationalmuseum’s The Old Library.
Accelerator, Stockholm University
17 May–15 September 2024
In the exhibition titled “Choose Mutation”, which includes a live performance, Vaginal Davis’s work with (and as part of) the CHEAP art collective takes center stage.
Index – Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art
17 May–1 September 2024
In a new installation titled “Vaginal Davis’s Hofpfisterei”, we dive into Vaginal Davis’s writing practice, from her years as teen correspondent in Los Angeles and her groundbreaking zines that held scenes together, to her mature years as a friction-writer.
MDT (Moderna Dansteatern)
4 September 2024
Together with My Wild Flag dance and performance festival, we are bringing Vaginal Davis’s cinerama movie experience to MDT! Please join Ms. Davis for an annotated screening of Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” (1979) and Miloš Forman’s “Hair” (1979) on September 4.
Tensta Konsthall
7 September 2024
At the end of this “magnificent product”, you are invited to a festival with lecturinas, performances, and screenings.
See the map and read more about all parts of the exhibition at The exhibition guide
Curator: Hendrik Folkerts, Moderna Museet
The exhibition “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product” is initiated by Moderna Museet and extends across several locations in Stockholm: Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Tensta konsthall and MDT (Moderna Dansteatern). Each institution highlights a different aspect of Vaginal Davis’s expansive practice.
The exhibition is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Terra Foundation for American Art.
Artist talk: Vaginal Davis
Meet Ms. Davis for a once-in-a-lifetime, not-be-missed, all-the-tea-spilled conversation with Moderna Museet curator Hendrik Folkerts. …
Artist talk: Vaginal Davis
Exhibition Guide
In the Moderna Museet exhibition guide, you will find audio guides, texts and other material aimed at making the visit to the museum more accessible. …
Your guide to the museum
Annual Pass
The Annual Pass gives you free admission to all our exhibitions for a whole year. Buy your Annual Pass today and visit us as often as you want! …