Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum

The New Museum has been dedicated to cutting-edge art and urgent ideas from its inception, devoting many exhibitions and programs over the years to issues of representation with regard to gender and sexuality: “Extended Sensibilities” (1982), “Difference” (1984–85), “Homo Video” (1986–87), and “Bad Girls” (1994) are just four notable examples. Following this tradition, and in our 40th anniversary year, “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” will aim to investigate gender’s place in contemporary art and culture today, placing special emphasis on the current stakes around visibility at our moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. Recently, gender has come to be more commonly understood as a spectrum, with various modes of expression and self-determination at play in reestablishing its parameters. “Trigger” will consider how even a fluid conception of gender is nonetheless marked by ongoing power negotiations and cannot be understood outside its complex intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability. The exhibition’s title, “Trigger,” takes into account that word’s range of meanings, variously problematic and potent; the term evokes both traumatic recall and mechanisms that, set into motion, are capable of igniting radical change.