No Body! Said the Two Lips
References to bodily fluids and fluid bodies coarse through the exhibition. The contact points between these diverse works - sites where the body mingles with the world and with itself - function as instances of fusion and transformation: between the human and mineral, the organic and inorganic, the personal and the political. The artists in the exhibition share a tendency described by Stacy Alaimo as trans-corporeality. “By emphasizing the movement across bodies,” Alaimo writes, “trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures […] opening up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.“
Working with materials like leather, bleach, and indigo, Rindon Johnson exhibits a series of works that, in the artist’s words, “live nearish to paintings as their questions are relational”. Johnson conceives of the materials he uses in his works as “by-products”, drawing alliances between his existence as a Black American and other material by-products of capitalist accumulation. “In his practice”, the writer Dana Kopel notes, “leather is a marked skin: weighted with decomposition and death, treated with materials - like indigo dye and coffee - that map the residue of chattel slavery.”
When? Where?
13 August - 10 September 2022
Société Berlin
Wielandstraße 26
10707 Berlin