Catfight Club

Mark Hogancamp

The Catfight Club: Learning from Marwencol

Opens March 14th

Catfight Club: Learning from Marwencol presents a re-reading of Mark Hogancamp’s work through the lens of contemporary political theater, feminist heroism, and the staged spectacle of conflict. While the exhibition includes a selection of Hogancamp’s iconic photographs and miniature dioramas from the world of Marwencol, its conceptual and physical center is a newly realized, full-scale replica of Catfight Club—an arena of performance, power, and projection.

Hogancamp’s Catfight Club has often been misunderstood as parody or pulp spectacle. This exhibition reframes it as a deliberate act of staging: a space where women are not victims or props, but protagonists who command narrative control. In Marwencol, women fight, survive, organize, and win—not for voyeuristic pleasure, but as expressions of agency, resistance, and survival. The exhibition draws a parallel between Hogancamp’s constructed battles and today’s kayfabe political environment: a culture in which conflict is exaggerated, rehearsed, and performed for public consumption. Like professional wrestling’s kayfabe, contemporary politics thrives on spectacle over substance, outrage over outcome. 

Catfight Club exposes this mechanism by making the artifice visible: the set, the rules, the choreography of conflict. Within this framework, Hogancamp’s work emerges as completely feminist. His female figures are neither decorative nor disposable; they are heroes forged through trauma, imagination, and control. By restaging violence as something authored rather than endured, Hogancamp transforms personal recovery into collective commentary. Catfight Club: Learning from Marwencol invites viewers to step inside the spectacle—to question who stages our conflicts, who benefits from them, and what it means to reclaim narrative power in a world addicted to performance.

Opening Saturday March 14, reception from 6-8pm