Host: Chapter II

Chapter II: Skin

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Host – a multi-chaptered online exhibition exploring the expansive topic of embodiment: the experience of navigating and perceiving the world from the perspective of a body. Reimagining a presentation of diverse artistic practices outside of a physical format, Host unfolds in three thematically distinct chapters, each accompanied by a Reading Room of additional materials.

“The thickness of our flesh guarantees relations, while skin ensures that we can distinguish our experience from the other’s. Yet since flesh and skin are not objects but synergetic, we are never cut off from the other. The skin is a boundary, but a permeable boundary.”

- The Visible and the Invisible, 2000, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Chapter II: Skin presents a series of works that unravel the conception of the embodied self as contained within an impermeable barrier, separating the individual subject from object and other.

Whilst Host’s previous chapter addressed the entanglement of bodies and the environments they inhabit, Chapter II explores the skin as a permeable threshold – a succinct metaphor for a porous idea of human agency embracing an interdependence between self and other.

From 1975-88, MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ and the German artist ULAY performed together, dealing with relations of duality. Abramović and Ulay pioneered performance as a visual art form. Some of their most historic performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. The body has always been both subject and medium. Exploring physical and mental limits in works that ritualise the simple actions of everyday life, they withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.

NOUR EL SALEH's dream-like works explore notions of place, belonging and selective/relative memory. Working instinctively, without creating studies, figures with exaggerated features appear out of the bodies of larger figures replicating and morphing on the canvas - interacting with the denizens of the artist’s selective conscious. By utilising theatrical references, masks and costumes, the characters in her stories probe conceptions of identity and place.

JENKIN VAN ZYL is interested in the slippages between gender identities. Deliberately queering the macho history of violence, Van Zyl’s ecstatic cinematic fantasy is concerned with both reclaiming autonomy and the pleasure to be found in abandoning all control. On his practice he states: "I have an attraction to phenomena that reside on the borderline between paradise and hell-scape, and my films play humorously within the genre of horror. I believe that at its most potent horror can redistribute fixed ideas of the self, yielding a grotesque pleasure in the wake of its ability to obliterate. Horror can show us the simultaneous terror and joy of being torn apart: to have fun with what hurts you."

In his soap works, MIROSŁAW BAŁKA brings together the sensory familiarity of his materials within the formal syntax of his minimal sculpture. The painstakingly assembled column of soap abstracts and sanctifies its individual parts, whilst also standing as a testament to the daily rituals that unite us all. At just under 3m tall, the height of the work is intended to reflect the limits of the human body (it is taller than the artist can reach) yet the soap-bars themselves are shaped by a profoundly levelling and corporeal human action; as the artist observes, we are washed as soon as we are born and washed after we die. In this way, Bałka's modest materials, selected for their resonance to his own childhood in Poland and Catholic upbringing, are transformed into conceptually loaded symbols of human existence.

STEPHANIE TEMMA HIER’s hybrid sculptural paintings address the entanglement of human, animal and vegetal through intimate encounters with various forms of consumption. Bodily and capitalist systems are evoked with equal poignance as lenses through which to locate our relationship to the biological world. The boundary between interior and exterior of the work blurs, mirroring the transformative rupture between bodies that occurs when eating. Photorealist oil renderings of found imagery are ornamentally framed within clay depictions of objects and environments, suggesting a porous, reciprocal interplay between image, subject and perception.

LUKAS HOFMANN looks at skin as a permeable border, at eczema and allergy as failures of hypersensitive immune systems, that can be freely transposed onto wider societal issues. Skin as a multi-layered metaphor and sphere becomes Hofmann’s zone for interaction, manipulation, (self)violation, sensation, or exploitation: both dividing the bodily self from the rest of the world, and providing access to it; a sphere of the most intimate contact, letting the environmental elements enter the body, holding the body together and yet being so vulnerable to outer powers.

JOEUN KIM AATCHIM uses natural paints on Korean silk, the illusory quality of the work imitating the shimmer of memory and the space between what is seen and what is recalled.

Returning to painting after corrective eye-surgery for strabismus in 2008, her negotiations with vision, reality and drawing have continued to become a metaphor for a kind of second sight, from which emerges a complex and multilayered image of the artist herself. While the layered compositions show the objects from multiple perspectives, they retain the clarity of something that has crystallised in one’s memory.

SAELIA APARICIO's work focuses on the body as an organism of hybridity, whose internal and external features change with passing time. She sees the skin as a costume for what is inside of each person, but a costume that can age and disease and whose features can quickly become dysmorphic. Each of her exhibitions creates a new ecosystem of characters that drives us into the present, and invites her viewers to consider alternative futures. Aparicio uses these exhibitions to explore universal issues from invasive species and housing problems, to pollution and the climate crisis.

Chapter III: Self will launch on 28 April. Visit Chapter I: Space here.