Immaterial Indignities: Desire, a Catalyst

In the organizer's words:

F-Festival 2025 (F for Fuck the patriarchy)

Immaterial Indignities: Desire, a Catalyst

Mary Katharine Tramontana

Talk - Photography exhibition - Reading

An archive of sexual longing: self-portraits, poems, and letters she sent to ambivalent lovers

Exhibition on view from 3 – 9 March in the foyer of Ballhaus Prinzenallee

 

Language: English

Her poems possess the same erotic solipsism as Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion — DAZED 

Her poetics of submission give the reader the option of subjecthood in either position —Toni Hildebrandt, editor of PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher

On the back of her much buzzed-about first solo show in Berlin (including a viral Dazed profile), artist, poet, author, and journalist (NYT, Esquire) Mary Katharine Tramontana will debut her new series Immaterial Indignities – a collection of self-portraits, poems, and letters she sent to ambivalent lovers (an art book publisher and a fashion PR) – in an exhibition, reading, and talk about making art from romantic abjection. In the obsessive energy of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997), she'll read published and private works from this archive, and give a talk, “Immaterial Indignities: Desire, a Catalyst,” about the liberatory power of sexual self-disclosure.

While men’s writing and art about their lives is often canonised as revealing universally relatable truths, women’s autobiographical work on lust has been historically dismissed as trivial and narcissistic until recently. Immaterial Indignities is a catalog of contemplation on sexual longing, appetite, and agency in a world that vehemently denies female desire and intellect as coexisting. Signed copies of Tramontana's hand-sewn limited edition artbook Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing (2024) – from which she'll also read – will be available. More on Instagram, X, and her website.

Mary Katharine Tramontana (b. 1982) has exhibited photography internationally in two solo shows and five group shows in Berlin, Miami, and Savannah since 2023. She’s given several talks on culture and gender, co-curating and collaborating with Reina Sofía, the Spanish Film Archive, WILZIG Museum, Arsenal Institute, Academy of Arts Berlin, silent green, Schwules Museum, and Technical University Berlin. Her writing on sexual politics and art is published in The New York Times,Esquire, Playboy, Women’s Health, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. The recipient of a Frieze arts writing bursary, she’s also worked as a sex research assistant at Kinsey Institute. Her first book, Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing (2024), was the heart of her first solo photography show in Berlin. This spring she'll be in residence at Villa Lena to write her first non-fiction book LUST: Porn, Pleasure, Power co-written with Erika Lust (2026). She lives in Berlin.

Price information:

10.00 - 15.00€