BERLIN.- Marking 20 years since artist, writer and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her home, Gropius Bau presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work in Germany. In her expansive oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets Black counterculture and resistance meets desire. Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Produkt holds the full scope of Ms. Davis’ practice, while also giving center stage to her many collaborative projects, with the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP and New York-based artist Jonathan Berger, among many others. Vaginal Davis’ work in painting, video and film, zine-making, writing, music and performance extends across the ground floor of Gropius Bau. Spanning from 1985 to 2025, it is presented in seven large-scale installations.


Delve into the groundbreaking world of Vaginal Davis. Click here to purchase "Vaginal Davis Magnificent Product" and explore the artist's radical vision and five decades of work.


“After hosting her first institutional exhibition in Berlin in 2019, we are thrilled to welcome Vaginal Davis back at Gropius Bau and give her the stage she deserves with the first comprehensive solo show in Germany, featuring works from over five decades. In her artistic practice, she has always rejected and disrupted traditional categories and conventions in art. We will start our spring programme in this punk spirit and continue to explore our vision: rethinking what an exhibition space can be – and whom it is for.” — Jenny Schlenzka, Director of Gropius Bau

Vaginal Davis is a living work of art: a performer, writer and creator of iconic zines; a visual artist, experimental filmmaker; a self-proclaimed Blacktress and drag terrorist, a gossip columnist, influential socialite, educator and countercultural renegade. Since the late 1970s, her oeuvre has pushed the boundaries of art, music and performance. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the United States, she named herself after feminist and Black Power activist Angela Davis, who also has a very special relationship to Berlin.

Early punk era

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Vaginal Davis became a founding mother of the city’s queer punk underground scene in the 1980s. Ms. Davis started a band called Afro Sisters in the late 1970s (who would eventually open for Happy Mondays and The Smiths), followed by other bands, including ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo (with Alice Bag), the speed metal thrash band Pedro, Muriel and Esther (PME, produced by Steve Albini) as well as black fag (with Bibbe Hansen, produced by Kim Gordon and Beck). Vaginal Davis became integral to the scene referred to as “homocore”, which parodied and challenged the white heterosexual bias of punk and refused the normative approach of the gay mainstream. Ms. Davis created her own mythology – an interplay between dis/identification, fiction and social critique – during the live performances of what she called her “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands. She spread the word across art and music networks through her self-published zines, and before long, she was playing to a growing audience on the stages of night clubs and punk venues.

Counterculture typology

Amidst the onset of the AIDS epidemic, when LGBTQIA+ rights barely existed, Ms. Davis created a radical alternative for both punk and queer politics, and those living outside of mainstream society. In her own words, Vaginal Davis was “too gay for the punk scene and too punk for the gays”. She became the embodiment of the fundamentally disruptive and destabilizing “terrorist drag”, pairing joy with resistance as she championed anti-normative, anti-capitalist and pro-punk aesthetics. From the infamous HAG gallery (1982–1989) to band projects, Xerox-printed fanzines and edgy art events, Ms. Davis’ projects became the talk of the town and eventually legendary. Club Sucker (1994–1999) – her Sunday afternoon punk and performance art club in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood – was a novelty, giving a stage to up-and-coming artists, bands, performers and weirdos of the LA art and underground scene, hosting a diverse and unconventional crowd. Soon, she became a muse and inspiration to the likes of choreographer Pina Bausch, fashion designer Rick Owens and artists Wu Tsang and Catherine Opie, and had a significant influence on the riot grrrl scene.

“Everything that is culturally fascinating and interesting in the world originated in the Black queer demimonde, then gets adapted by the Black straight populace, then co-opted into dominant or popular culture.” — Vaginal Davis

Berlin

In 2005, following frequent collaboration with Berlin-based art collective CHEAP, Ms. Davis packed her bags and relocated to the German capital. Here, she continues to be a vital contributor and organiser across cultural fields, from international teaching positions and transdisciplinary projects to exhibiting her work in various contexts. She has been curating and hosting the film series Rising Stars, Falling Stars at Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art e. V. since 2007. In her own unforgettable way, she presents rare films, classics and gems, and has published a reader containing most of her fascinating introductory texts. Between Ms. Davis’ apartment in the west and her studio in the eastern part of the city, she continues to find inspiration in the texture of the German capital.

“My Berlin idols are the genius filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, the late, great Birgit ‘I Will Make You Sweat’ Hein and her ex-husband, the experimental film guru Wilhelm Hein. Berlin is beautiful but bleak, just like its official sister city, Los Angeles. I don’t mind the Berlin ‘distance’ conundrum. I appreciate that you always know where you stand here with people. There is none of the forced familiarity and niceties that Los Angeles is known for as a banal entertainment industry hub. Give me Berlin’s cloudy grey skies and grumpy Norberty bluntness any day of the week.” — Vaginal Davis

The exhibition

Fabelhaftes Produkt is made up of seven major installations, folding in histories that took place on diverse stages, in vibrant nightclubs and apartment galleries, spread far and wide through the xeroxed pages of her zines and extensive correspondences, anchored in both LA and Berlin. The installations stage Ms. Davis’ archive anew, reinterpreting the movements of her artistic practice and, in so doing, drawing connections to burning questions today.

One such example is the Carla DuPlantier Cinerama Dome (2024), an installation named after Ms. Davis’ cousin, Carla “Maddog” DuPlantier of the band The Controllers, who introduced her to the LA punk scene. Taking up the iconic 1960s architecture of the Cinerama Dome on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, Ms. Davis’ installation hosts several of her early films. Some of them showcase the artist’s role in the LA queer underground scene, reflected through recordings of her iconic punk concerts and nightclub events from the 1990s. These works are presented alongside a selection of materials from her vast archive.

In much of Ms. Davis’ work, social commentary emerges in a whimsical, offbeat style: In her no-budget video That Fertile Feeling (1983), Vaginal Davis and Fertile La Toyah Jackson co-star as two women at the edge of society. Initially rejected from film festivals and by now considered a cult classic, the work focuses a critical lens on US-American society and the limited access to healthcare across the spectrum of race, gender and class. Her touchstone film The White to be Angry (1999), challenges constructions and desires around white supremacist culture, offering a sharp image of the United States and right-wing extremism – tackling a topic that remains relevant today.

The installation HAG – small, contemporary, haggard (2012/2024) is a tribute to and inspired by the original HAG Gallery, which Ms. Davis opened in her former apartment at 7850 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California in 1982. Over its seven years of existence, HAG presented work mostly by individuals who didn’t consider themselves artists and who did not go to art school, from musicians like Alice Bag and Colleen Pancake to actors like John Drew Barrymore and Holly Woodlawn. At Gropius Bau, HAG features Ms. Davis’ signature cosmetics-and-tempera paintings of “women trapped in the bodies of women”, wallpaper collages of lesbian domesticity and totemic bread sculptures – all work that Ms. Davis has made in Berlin.

The Wicked Pavilion (2021) takes the visitors further into Vaginal Davis’ universe. In the so-called Fantasia Library, she creates a self-portrait of herself as a writer, while also showing her literary lineage in a pantheon of femme writers. In the Tween Bedroom, Ms. Davis shows herself through the desires and fantasies of a tween girl, with a human-sized dildo in a rotating bed as the centrepiece. And of course, everything is Josephine Baker-pink. In the installation Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat (2024/2025), Vaginal Davis highlights her life-long fascination with author Frank L. Baum and illustrator John R. Neill’s 13-volume Oz series in a new multi-media work made in collaboration with artist Jonathan Berger.

Next, the installation HOFPFISTEREI showcases Ms. Davis’ writing practice, from her years as a teen correspondent in Los Angeles and her groundbreaking zines, to her mature years as a “friction writer”. Featuring a wide range of genres – from poetry to long-format journalism to fabricated confessional literature and tabloid gossip columns – the presentation mirrors Ms. Davis’ dynamic leaps between downtown nightlife, academic lectures and gallery settings. The diverse formats on display point to the various avenues of dissemination and circulation Ms. Davis has employed over the decades, all of which paved the way for countless digital iterations of self-publishing. Speaking from the Diaphragm, Ms. Davis’ long-running online diary, was conceived in the early days of the internet, before the existence of blogging on pre-coded platforms.

CHEAP

In the final installation, the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP presents the video, sound and object installation Choose Mutation, with photographs by Annette Frick (concept by Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel and Martin Siemann). The featured video, also titled Choose Mutation, combines found and original footage in a dystopian collage about paranoia and the effects of social and political control on language and the body. Its title is inspired by writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s 2020 article Learning from the Virus, in which he reflects on the political dimensions of illnesses, immunity and community. Video, sound and objects installation are accompanied by nine larger-than-life-sized black and white photographs by Annette Frick, featuring portraits of CHEAP from some of their earliest projects, including CHEAP Klub.

The art collective CHEAP was founded in Berlin in 2001. CHEAP’s work includes performances, videos, festivals, concerts, installations and radio shows. In any format, their practice combines theory and pleasure, politics and whimsy, aesthetics and sex. The collective frequently collaborates with artists from different disciplines, such as Jonathan Berger, Bruce LaBruce, Pola Sieverding and Xiu Xiu. Ms. Davis has worked with the group from its early days, first as a guest, then as a crucial collective member.

Vaginal Davis

Vaginal Davis was born during the latter half of the twentieth century, in the eastern part of Los Angeles, to a Black Creole mother and Mexican-born father. At the age of eight, she mounted her first exhibition, a spin on L. Frank Baum’s famous Oz books, at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the United States, Vaginal named herself after feminist political activist Angela Davis – forever cementing her name in the annals of history: Vaginal Davis


Artdaily participates in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. These commissions help us continue curating and sharing the art world’s latest news, stories, and resources with our readers.