A group of international artists hopes to bend audience perspectives of gender and sexuality in a month-long exhibition SF State’s Fine Arts Gallery.

Bent: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Scandinavian Art opens Feb 11. The exhibit contrasts modern media such as photography, video and film with historic paintings to create dialogues between the past, present and future.

The exhibit realizes a vision started four years ago when a delegation from Sweden visited SF State to discuss mutual interests in increasing overseas educational exchanges. Ideas from that forum formed “Bridging the Baltic”, a series of art programming dedicated to celebrating the Baltic region, and Bent exhibit will kick it off.

“The theme is gender and sexuality so people naturally associate nudity with that subject,” said Cristina Lichauco, 26, a museum studies graduate student who handles promotions for the exhibit. “But Bent is really more about gender roles and how people are viewed – this exhibit tweaks traditional expectations of women and men in society.”

The Scandinavian artists participating in this event aim to reexamine conventional thinking regarding gender and sexuality and the way people understand relationships between visual images, the social world, and individual sexual identity.

At the exhibit students can experience the dark industrial spaces of the private gallery rooms that feature three separate video sound pieces and projected art projects. In addition, the main floor holds large size still photographs contrasted with historic Nordic paintings from the the 19th and 20th centuries. A multimedia television installment piece on loan from the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes up the last component of the exhibition and lends color and sound to the main gallery floor.

Mark Johnson, director of the Fine Arts Gallery, hopes students will take advantage of the opening day event line-up which was a collaboration involving the Music, Art, Theater and Cinema departments on campus.

The reception for the artists and opening celebration is from 12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The lineup is as follows:
• 1:00 p.m. Theater presentation of A Ringside View, a 20th century drama laced with sexual tension
• 1:30 p.m. SF State Chamber singers perform Scandinavian choral selections
• 2:00 p.m. Bent artist panel and audience forum – meet the artist themselves who have traveled from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland to participate in discussion
• 3:00 p.m. Film screening: Screaming Masterpiece, a documentary about contemporary music in Iceland featuring artists like Bjork.

“Exposure to external communities is really good for our students,” Lichauco said. “It can be sort of isolating on our campus – this is an opportunity to explore not only art, gender and sexuality, but new parts of the world.”