Rising Mask Maker, Visual, Aural and Performance Artist Ela Xora launches a new series of exhibitions during her Artist In Residency at Limewharf Gallery which build on extensive UN, Council of Europe and Amnesty International statements to end the stigmatizing legal invisibility, non consenting genital, psychological and hormonal modification of Intersex people, forcing them into exclusive Binary Gender categories which go against their nature and biology.
Xora will open the series with the exhibition “Recognise Intersex in law or continue: The Castration of Agdistis, Cybele, Sarah and many others” an exhibition which pits mythology against biology, delving into the fascinating and little known roots of Western Culture’s historical persecution and castration of Intersex and Trans human beings and the State Genital Mutilation of them to this day. This is the crescendo to Xora’s joint exhibitions with Royal Sculptor Frances Segelman, iconic photographer Barry Lategan and a petition which has been celebrity supported by Graham Norton, Lena Headey, Frances Segelman, Richard O’Brien, Natalia Tena, Courtney Love and Sir Derek Jacobi to date.
Xora announced recently to BBC World Service during an exclusive interview that a planned Hunger Strike performance called “Divided We Fall” inspired by Pink Floyd’s seminal track “Hey You” will take place one month from the opening exhibition if the UK government does not announce an inquiry looking into UN statements about establishing full and equal human rights for Intersex people in UK law within that month period.
In Xora’s most socio politically challenging exhibition for LGBTI rights since last years “The Silver Bo(X)” which saw her appear on the front cover of the Independent On Sunday, as well as being featured in The Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard and a plethora of art press, the artist invites the public to witness for the first time a new collection of pure 999 hallmarked Silver Masks, paintings, performance art pieces, plus aural art by film stars and Game of Thrones stars Lena Headey and Natalia Tena, on the early Western State adopted condemnation and genital mutilation of previously revered Androgynous Greco Roman Deities of nature such as Agdistis/Cybele and the Trans and Intersex clergy and genders forced to suffer the same fate. In this never seen before art spectacle, Xora becomes the first artist to unearth and document the effect these man written mythologies have had on Western Cultures “masked” view of Androgyny, also recording the institutionalised pseudo medical gender hierarchy documented in the Greco Roman Hippocratic Corpus medical bible which arguably founded and continues to mirror the pathological categorisation and thus stigmatization of anyone born with ambiguous sexual organs ever since.
Xora’s precious metal masks in particular elucidate a line of connectivity between these sinister, unscientific early Western myths and the shadows they have cast on people like ex Radio One agony aunt, Big Breakfast director and acclaimed Addiction Therapist Sarah Graham, who was born Intersex and has been a victim of extreme stigmatization, plus non consenting genital, hormonal and psychological abuse at the hands of the UK State. In this never seen before art event, Ela Xora primarily focuses on Sarah Graham’s historic fight for legal recognition of Intersex biology, becoming Xora’s principle and most extraordinary muse to date, for what promises to be the most socio politically challenging exhibition in art history for Trans and Intersex equal human rights.