Misreading Masquerades

‘(Mis)reading Masquerades’ focuses on the notion of masquerade from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together texts shared and read among more than fifty artists, curators, writers, and theoreticians who comprise the If I Can’t Dance Reading Group for Edition III – Masquerade (2008–10) and research projects with the Dutch Art Institute, Enschede and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

The texts address masquerade through ideas of transgression, gender identity and subversion, gesture, the carnivalesque, the construction of subjectivity, authorship, mimesis, and alterity. New essays by writers and curators from the contemporary art field accompany introductions to thematic groupings of texts by Reading Group participants.