A surface freak
Rey Akdogan, Camille Kingué & Raphaël Massart, Hanna Rochereau, Cammie Toloui, Perla Zúñiga
Gallery
13.11.26 - 19.12.26NıCOLETTı is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by Paris-based writer and curator Salomé Burstein opening next Friday, 13 November at the gallery. Between stages and mousetraps, display devices and peep-show booths, A surface freak brings together works that reveal the mechanisms behind what’s made to meet the eye. Each piece negotiates nexuses of exposure and concealment, where visual pleasure often hinges on what remains out of sight.
Going from storage to storefront, painter and sculptress Hanna Rochereau starts where things are either exhibited or put to sleep. Through uninvited gazes and unauthorized access, her works explore sites of spectacle and consumption, catching them in states of dormancy or functional suspension. They condense accumulative tendencies with emptied-out landscapes, the spectral with the sweat, rendering absence through the thickness of a multi-layered painting process. Visual artist Rey Akdogan’s Clip on series rather conveys a choreography of subtraction, of peeling and folding–sequences of meticulous gestures cutting through display fixtures, unveiling their material substrate and rearranging their remains through delicate decompositions. Akdogan foregrounds the textures that mediate our encounter with commodities, incising both surfaces and attentional habits, refracting the explicit into the invisible. A similar tension may be observed in photographer Cammie Toloui’s Lusty Lady series (1991–93), named after the iconic San Francisco strip-club where she was then working. Smuggling her camera into the peep-show booth and offering her clients a free dildo show in exchange for having their portraits taken, Toloui subverts the transactional relationship through a triangulation with the camera. She thus reclaims the act of looking, negating the object-status while granting us a view from inside the vitrine. Also playing with the entwinement of entrapment, seduction and display, the work of artist, poet and DJ Perla Zúñiga builds from embodied experiences and everyday objects. Her pieces work through the alternating motions of desire, illness, partying, in a constant confrontation with both fantasy and the external world. DIY sculptures repurposing pearls, stockings, or needles here shift into optical devices; peep holes that engage and frustrate the observer, acting as “small scenarios or theatrical containers […] bringing with them forms of sociability, care, and lived experience rooted in [Zuñiga] trans community, electronic music culture, and her navigation of cancer treatment”1 to quote curator and poet Leto Ybarra. Relationships also form the primary matter of Sex 2 (2024), a poetry chapbook by author Camille Kingué, fragments of which have since found their way into a sound collaboration with artist Raphaël Massart. Navigating ties of resistance and intimacy, between virtuality and physicality, these recordings bathe the space in bits and pieces of a missed conversation, tracing the distance between bodies, the projections they summon, and the occasional rifts of fleshly encounters.
Borrowing its title from a phrase by artist and Museum of lesbian dreams inventor Millie Wilson, A surface freak hints at perceptual mechanisms and manipulations. Whether entertainment culture, retail logics or the day-to-day image overflow, the artists all probe the aesthetic machinery of capitalism and its take or effects on embodied life. Stages, skin, containers of all kinds become testing grounds for examining the production of desire, the circulation of value, the commodification of bodies or invisibilization of labour. Through acts of subtraction, inversion, through spying and allure, the exhibition highlights the unsuspected and thrilling density of surfaces–a hidden manifoldness that ultimately places vision itself under scrutiny.
Text by Salomé Burstein
1. Leto Ybarra, “Perla Zuñiga: Mousetraps, Tinker Bell and Holes,” Juf, July 10, 2024, https://jufjuf.org/en/post/perla-zuniga