Name: Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust
Start: 2025-02-01T10:00:00-05:00
Location: 1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA, United States, Massachusetts 01247

In Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust, Anna Ting Möller, New Red Order, and Nguyễn Duy Mạnh use the aesthetics of disgust to understand the social construction of putrid and squalid things. Disgust has been interpreted as an evolutionary tool of survival to create distance between ourselves and that which may harm us, particularly foods. Beyond fears of contamination and filth aversion, disgust has also been weaponized as a tool of oppression, including in colonial and caste systems. To assign the label of ‘disgusting’ to something also implies ‘lesser than’ or ‘filthy’ statuses — intertwining visceral disgust, or the instinctual sensation of being repulsed by something, with the politics of moral and interpersonal disgust.