Exhibition view, Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust, 2025, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Photo credit : Kaelan Burkett
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.
Representing bodies beyond skin — mutilated figures, deformed sculptures, and overflowing fleshy wetness — these artists and their art interrogate the limits of traditional kinship and capitalist and colonialist structures and rethink illusory certainties of human experience. Through ceramics, kombucha scoby, and photogrammetry, the artists pick at the sutures of social structures and uncover the ways in which the ostensibly innate responses of disgust can be (re)programmed.
Curator: Riley Yuen
Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust is made possible by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. Support for this exhibition is provided by Galerie BAO and The Outpost. Additional support has been provided by the Consulate General of Sweden; Williams College Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Williams College Phi Beta Kappa Society; Williams College Department of History, Department of American Studies; Williams College Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Culture; Williams College Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Williams College Department of Global Studies.
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