SLQS Gallery, 20 Club Row, E2 7EY
Free but RSVP essential
8 March 2025 at 5pm
For the launch of her first book, Embodied Histories: Medicalised Sexuality, Childbirth and Subversive Bodies (2025), Dyana Gravina presents a performance ritual that embodies their somatic and transhistorical research into the political and physiological connections between childbirth and sexuality. Through art, somatic practices and writing, it wants to subvert conventional notions of femininity and masculinity, seeking to reclaim demonised behaviours, body autonomy, and radical subjectivity.
With the desire to create new layers of awareness, the book reconciles the histories of the medicalisation of childbirth and the moralisation and repression of sexuality, long kept separate. From the rise of Christianity and the Church’s alliance with medicine, to Puritanism, feminists and queer movements, and technological advances, this combined history becomes a personal investigation into systemic patterns shaping public and private experiences. In a world that increasingly detaches from the body and its pleasures, exploits it under capitalist demands, and shapes identities under patriarchal conditioning, this is an invitation to return to the body, using the force of birth, its contractions and impulses to walk a transformative path to reimagining sex, birth, and liberation.
The book concludes with conversations and a creative embodied exploration of these themes between Dyana Gravina and interdisciplinary artists Dagmara Bilon, Amy Dignam, Leni Dothan, Laima Leyton, Kadie Salmon, Khaoula B Karaweigh and Stefania Zocco.
Dyana Gravina: Embodied Histories: Medicalised Sexuality, Childbirth and Subversive Bodies (2025), published by Wysewomen Publishing and designed by Alessia Arcuri
Accessibility and content notes: the gallery is on the second floor and only accessible by stairs. Some of the performance will be visible from outside and for this part there is no number restriction. The audience number in the gallery is capped at 50 people for safety reasons. Families with children are most welcome. Please note that there might be partial or full nudity and text/sound related to childbirth and sexuality. Parents have agency on deciding what is appropriate for them and are welcome to step in and out of the space as they wish.
