paula zvane

Press release

We are containers to be contained, hormones to be regulated, saved from the dysfunctionality of our ambiguous bodies. We are subject to the emotional, the sensuous, the erotic, the manifestation of invisible energies, and hence hysterical, monstrous bodies. How, then, to rule the uncanny? How to keep it concealed? Our monotheist, phallocentric Western cultural system did so by imposing a binary language and exclusive system of representation for us to define ourselves with. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. 1 Fragmented and stigmatised, we then might ask ourselves to what degree is disgust towards our bodies innate or learned?2 We are mould to be bleached when we don’t fit, when we bleed, when we are not “natural”, when we lack, when we overflow. If we are unknowable, we are unthinkable, then uncontrollable. Yet mould is a fungi, its murky organic matter inherently alive and capable of infinite generative power. It has a language of its own that allows its mycelium and its spores to communicate, sustain each other, and exist. 

We shall learn from the earthly organic matter that surrounds us. We shall reclaim our mould, our unruly flesh, our monstrosity, our unsettling erotic power. We shall overflow and propagate endlessly. Body Mould is an invitation to tear apart, reveal  our innermost depths and in doing so reclaim our uncanny bodies, our language, creating words of our own to speak our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. 3 Hailing from different countries, paths, and artistic journeys, the emerging and early-career artists presented in the exhibition confront stigmas through their own situated perspective. Their urge to constitute a visual language that expresses the truths and fluctuations of their own bodily experience, situates them in a lineage of artists whose pioneering practices paved the way for subaltern voices to exist in our culture and in the history of art. 

1 Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.2 Elkin, Lauren, “Art Monsters: Unruly bodies in feminist art”, Vintage, 2024 

3 Lorde, Audre, “Sister Outsider “, Penguin Classics, 2019 

From Georgia O'Keeffe who used voluptuous painterly gestures as words to her relationship to the earthly landscape she was surrounded by, to Ana Mendieta who laid down on the earth, floated in water, evoking through her bodily traces the universal energy that runs through insects, humans and plants alike. I think of Loie Fuller and Rebecca Horn, whose performative interventions saw their limbs lengthened, extended as if in the attempt of taking up space. Maria Lassing articulated the experience of inhabiting a body through a series of self-portraits rooted in what she called “body awareness”, while Claudette Johnson’s images of Black women like “And I Have My Own Business in This Skin” (1982) affirmed the Black subject outside of a colonialist perception of Blackness. Helen Chadwick’s research on gender led her to question Western dual oppositional structures creating representations that leave space for ambiguity and a disquieting sexuality. Almost ten years after her “Enfleshings” series (1989), which to Chadwick embodied selfhood as conscious meat, Sarah Lucas was using humour to unearth obscene paradoxes created by patriarchal constructions, while Marlene Dumas was portraying the human figure in exploration of themes of race and gender, sensuality and violence, personal and public identities. And yet, the urgency of finding materials to transcribe the body and foster its own language is still here.