Jesse Bransford, Elijah Burgher, Oliver Coran, Keturah Cummings, Frank Haines, Sholem Krishtalka, Anwar Mahdi, David Anaya Maya, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Ryan M. Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz, and Timothy Wyllie

Organized by Berlin-based artists Elijah Burgher and carrick bell, The Venusians is presented by New Discretions, New York + Sean Horton (Presents), New York + Western Exhibitions, Chicago. Venus is thought by astrologers to influence those zones of human experience over which the planet’s namesake Goddess is sovereign: love, intimacy, attraction, beauty, pleasure, luxury and the good life. Alchemically, Venus corresponds to copper, used for mirrors in the ancient world for its high reflectiveness when polished. Indeed, the goddess is frequently depicted at her toilette, gazing at her reflection while tending her appearance. A mixture of self-care and vanity are amongst her attributes, as well then. The roman goddess and her Greek counterpart, Aphrodite, are not the only goddesses of antiquity identified with the planet: Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte and other Queens of Heaven preceded them. The Sumerian goddess Inanna’s journey into the underworld was a mythic translation of a visible, celestial fact: periodically Venus goes retrograde and appears to be moving backwards in the sky. (Interestingly, Venus spins in an opposite direction to the other planets in our solar system, so it could be said she rotates in a retrograde manner.) Inanna’s descent is not only instructive in terms of the planet’s rich history of religious symbolism, but also implicates the negative valence of these goddesses’ principal attribute. Love is not only a matter of joy, romance and sex but also jealousy, infidelity, grief and even murderous rage.
 

In bringing together this sundry group of artists and dubbing them “Venusians,” we highlight certain threads that connect them and to which the goddess holds the reigns: sexuality, beauty and magick. Venusians, as we define them, draw out the electrical potentials of the sexual body. Elements of sex magick and other rituals, both self-invented and received, find the body unfurling as a tether between cosmic and terrestrial spheres, fellow humans, and non-human and natural participants. Some works represent these practices. Others actively function as elements of ongoing ritual, or are remnants of previously performed ritual acts. Beauty is paramount whether it is a matter of esoteric order, aesthetic expertise or reconceived through challenge or negation. In any case, those electrical potentials must be circulated through an object that conducts those energies to viewers, recasting them as candidates for seduction or religious conversion or taunting them as suspiciously disinterested anthropologists. Those are the stakes. Venusians seek connection that goes beyond mere discourse.