Eli Ågrup, Swedish born and London based, has graduated as interior designer from Regent’s University. Ågrup is specialised in fabric and embroidery work and has been life modelling for art schools and life drawing groups. They also work as a non-binary model.
Orlando Myxx, Italian-born and London-based, is an artist who works with photography, performance and video. Myxx is committed to a long-term autobiographical project, in which they explore the deconstruction and reconstruction of gender identity through varying stages of the transition process. In this series, they mainly use their body as a symbolic force that can perform the unconscious and heterogeneous forces involved in the gender transition process. Works of this series have been exhibited at Nunnery Gallery and Peltz Gallery - London, CCCB - Barcelona, Project Space - Lincoln (UK), LABS Gallery - Bologna (IT). Their on-going project XX Masculinity which started in 2013 with the aim to explore the idea of ‘masculinity without men’, functions both as a queer manifesto and as an archive of the gender expression of individuals and has been presented in various festivals in Italy including GendErotica Roma, Padova Pride Village, Festival delle Arti di Giudecca and Sacca Fisola in Venice.
Both performers’ pronouns are they/them.
What happens to sex when there are no gender roles? Can we think of ungendered sex?
Ågrup and Myxx will bring to UNCENSORED a performance/life drawing session with two trans/non-binary life models who will perform still sex offering to the participants an array of poses of various sex practices.
Untitled nudes features transmasculine bodies and sexualities that are underrepresented, marginalised and, in a sense, ‘censored’ by the mainstream sex and gender regime. Ågrup and Myxx explore the notions of gender identity and gender performativity, challenging the established heteronormative-cisgender setting of life drawing sessions and the implicit rule that the body to be looked at should be one and available to be sexualised as long as its own sexuality isn’t expressed more actively. Untitled nudes is a powerful critique of normative perceptions of sex and gender through the encounter of two bodies that resist titles and classification.
The music that will be played during the session will mainly be by trans/non-binary artists in an attempt to bring together different types of performativity coming from trans people.
Materials will be provided.
SUNDAY 19 MAY 14:00 - 16:00 @The Yard Theatre
Henri T Art
© Eli Agrup & Orlando Myxx