body echo

body echo

GABRıELE BEVERıDGE

JULıETTE BONNEVıOT

DONNA HUANCA

MARY HURRELL

MAı-THU PERRET

SıMONE STEENBERG

25.05.18 - 03.06.18


21 - 23 RUE DES FıLLES DU CALVAıRE, 75003 PARıS





For its first exhibition, NıCOLETTı brings together a group of international artists investigating the contemporary representation of the female body via multiple artistic strategies, including photography, painting, sculpture, and performance.

 

‘The body’, Gilles Deleuze tells us, ’is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, tiredness and waiting.’ Of the before, the body bears the inscriptions: on its skin – envelope which seems to contain it and onto which are registered the impressions of exterior stimuli – on its members, its organs. Interface between interiority and exteriority, the thought and the unthought, it has its own language composed of postures, gestures, attitudes: signs through which it presents itself to, and communicate with the world, encountering other bodies with which it speaks, dances, argues, drinks, fights, or makes love. Altering their states, stimulating or repressing their affects and desires, these encounters generate spatiotemporal arrangements: the echo of bodies assembling, demonstrating, and waiting to liberate their potential.

 

Starting its investigation on what is being done to bodies, the exhibition proposes a series of speculation on their yet-to-be-determined capacities via different regimes of representation. Focusing on the female representation of the female body, the plurality of artworks presented embrace and tend to affirm the transient quality and constant variability of the latter. In turn, the artists interrogate and redefine the place of the female body in relation to objects and materiality, as well as within public space. Whether through the thwarting of its pristine, yet neutralized and depersonalized image in cosmetic advertisement campaigns and fashion editorials, or through a reflection on its increasingly (auto)photographed, edited, and uploaded version, the constellation of artworks featuring the exhibition both deconstruct and propose alternative representations of the female body. Through multiple strategies, they operate a decoding of the colonizing, if not already internalized processes of objectification. Blurred, wrapped, absent, even grotesque at times, a series of dismantlement of the female body is worked through as to release its potentia. Intensive, performative, and ungraspable, it becomes plural, euphoric, emancipated: a non-unitary, nomadic body, defined by the post-feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti as ‘multifunctional and complex, a transformer of flows and energies, affects, desires, and imaginings.’ Generating new attitudes, postures, and languages, these bodies open towards uncodified space-time(s) wherein places can be redistributed, and interactions can be reformulated anew. From there, no longer constrained by their biological physiology, bodies become speculative. At the crossroad between the human and the non-human, new patterns of interconnectedness anticipate and announce future ecologies and systems in which the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic, the real and the fictional dissipate.

 

Text by Camille Houzé



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