Ianna Book

Trans Avenue

Ianna Book’s multidisciplinary and autobiographical art practice centres around her experience as a transsexual woman. By offering her body as a powerful and critical space for iconographic exploration, Book analyzes the promiscuous relations maintained by identity with culture, politics, social space, and public discourse — in other words, an amalgam of heteronormative systems of meaning that are insidiously, or even violently, transphobic.

These themes are addressed in the photographic series Trans Avenue, through which the artist highlights and explores the emancipatory potential of the city in regard to non-conformist identities. Created between 2011 and 2013 in Montréal and New York, the series offers a frank yet intimate portrait of Book, documenting the sex change she underwent during that period. The photographs, a selection of which form the subject of a book, convey an ironic and caustic dialogue on the female form as sculptural material and matter for ideological surgery. Far from reinforcing the stereotypical codes of normative femininity, Book presents a metaphorical re-appropriation of her corporeality by adopting social space as a vehicle for transformation and release. Taking advantage of the liberating power afforded by performance and the big city, she exposes and enshrines her body and its atypical identity in the urban fabric in a way that reverses the chronic invisibility experienced by trans people, even within the LGBTQ community. The low-key and anonymous aesthetic of the metropolis serves as backdrop to the sensuality and peremptory stance of the artist, who thus promotes and gives voice to a marginalized community.

[Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft]