Chris Korda at Le Confort Moderne
EAT A QUEER FETUS FOR JESUS, 1996, and the now-ubiquitous slogan SAVE THE PLANET KILL YOURSELF, 1998, are among the many proclamations printed and handpainted on banners, protest indicators, and different assorted merchandise dispersed all through Le Confort Moderne’s major gallery. Relics of the Church of Euthanasia, the environmentalist, antinatalist group based in 1992 by Chris Korda, they type the crux of the exhibition “The (Wo)Man of the Future,” which was curated by Paris-based artwork house Goswell Highway. The retrospective spans the trans activist’s thirty-year profession in artwork, music, efficiency, and software program design.
The cumulative impact of those items, teamed with archival images and video footage of the church’s infiltration of public and media areas via Happenings, billboard commercials, and even an look on the Jerry Springer Present, is to sow doubt. Shock techniques apart, if the church’s mission to stem ecological catastrophe via the culling of humankind has usually been dismissed as a harmful cult or a vulgar sensible joke, it might very properly be as a result of Korda, who shuns subtlety, excels at appropriating the very language and instruments of political populism and evangelism which can be prevalent throughout mass media and tradition. Crowning this amalgamation of aggressive blasphemies is Brigitte, 1996, an inflatable intercourse doll crucified for committing the last word sin: procreation. The top of her “carnivorous child” pokes out of her vagina.
An adjoining room accommodates a full discography together with more moderen digital kinetic sculptures created utilizing open-source software program coded by the artist. These latter could lack the darkish pointedness of the church or the contagious vitality of Korda’s techno music, however they preserve a shared purpose of dispelling the ingrained fallacy of human-centrism. At its most convincing, Korda’s work elicits a bodily jolt and nervous laughter. A lot the higher to awaken vital colleges dulled by neoliberalism.
— Anya Harrison
