We are excited to be involved in this project during Berlin Art Week at Come Again! (@comeagain.berlin)⁠ ⁠ Organized by Berlin-based artists Elijah Burgher and carrick bell, "The Venusians" is presented by New Discretions, New York + Sean Horton (Presents), New York + Western Exhibitions, Chicago.⁠ ⁠ Featuring: Jesse Bransford, Elijah Burgher, Oliver Coran, Keturah Cummings, Frank Haines, Sholem Krishtalka, Anwar Mahdi, David Anaya Maya, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Ryan M. Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz, and Timothy Wyllie⁠ ⁠ In bringing together this sundry group of artists and dubbing them “Venusians,” we highlight certain threads that connect them and to which the goddess holds the reigns: sexuality, beauty and magick. Venusians, as we define them, draw out the electrical potentials of the sexual body. Elements of sex magick and other rituals, both self-invented and received, find the body unfurling as a tether between cosmic and terrestrial spheres, fellow humans, and non-human and natural participants. Some works represent these practices. Others actively function as elements of ongoing ritual, or are remnants of previously performed ritual acts. Beauty is paramount whether it is a matter of esoteric order, aesthetic expertise or reconceived through challenge or negation. In any case, those electrical potentials must be circulated through an object that conducts those energies to viewers, recasting them as candidates for seduction or religious conversion or taunting them as suspiciously disinterested anthropologists. Those are the stakes. Venusians seek connection that goes beyond mere discourse.⁠ ⁠ Pictured: Elijah Burgher / "Oliver & the Martian," 2022 (Detail) / Watercolor and colored pencil on paper / 76 x 56 cm (29.9 x 22 in)