Cassie Augusta Jørgensen at O—Overgaden

Artist: Cassie Augusta Jørgensen

Exhibition title: Slit Your Clit

Venue: O—Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark

Date: November 25, 2023 – January 28, 2024

Photography: ©David Stjernholm / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Overgaden, Copenhagen

Note: Exhibition’s booklet is available here

The vilified stereotype of the trans woman—clad in a shiny trench coat, blonde wig, nylon stockings, fierce make-up—is unpicked in the young Danish artist Cassie Augusta Jørgensen’s first large-scale exhibition.

Entering the show, a pinkish-red trench coat—created with fashion designer Alectra Rothschild— impersonates this typified monstrosity. While it is juicily seductive, kinky in its glossy sparkle and transparency, the coat borders on exhibitionist and its elongated fit seems to suggest the transfeminine villain’s nonconforming limbs, potentially too long, mannered in measures.

On a grand screen behind the coat, the exhibition’s centerpiece plays. The new, approximately ten-minute film, Slit Your Click, is a skewed riff on the famous “museum scene” in Brian De Palma’s thriller Dressed to Kill from 1980. In Jørgensen’s film loop, we follow cruising bodies: a cis-gendered woman (Kate) and a man (The Stranger) both filmed and followed by a trans woman (The Blonde) wearing a red trench coat. The three move through the Danish National Gallery: silently, theatrically, performatively, chasing and being chased, triangulating erotic tension.

Serial translucent stills from the film are placed on the walls. Back-lit and small- scale, they demand close-up interaction, like holding intimate celluloid negatives up to the light. Carving up the kunsthalle’s existing architecture, they remind us that even the supposedly unchanging structure of the art institution or museum is just another performative front that, like our personal identities, can be cut open, turned transparent, changed, flipped.

In De Palma’s film, which explicitly quotes Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the “museum scene” triggers the woman, Kate, to run away with the strange man, only to later be slayed in an elevator by The Blonde. The moral seems to be that women, liberated sexually, are either deserving of punishment or inherently deranged—whether trans woman or not. In Jørgensen’s feminist rebuke of this stereotype, her scene ends with the blonde trans woman passing over her camera to Kate, inviting her to reject the role of classical femme as filmed by male directors. Meanwhile, The Blonde takes on her own persona in full, slashes—or slits—the clichéd voyeurism and violent societal stereotype to which she’s been subjected. Jørgensen’s trans woman thus evades the role of the marginal villain; she instead walks away from the museum possessing the film’s focus, becoming its sympathetic heroine.