Host: Chapter III

Chapter III: Self

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.

Chapter III: Self

Host’s third and final chapter explores the body’s relationship to ideas of selfhood. The conception of the individual self rests on our experience of consciousness as a singular voice, issuing commands to a compliant body.

“Individual” = that which cannot be divided any further. Yet the body is an ecosystem in which human cells are outnumbered by bacterial cells.

The conception of the indivisible and individual self now appears as a fading illusion, replaced by a permeable, collective idea of human agency comprised of microorganisms, fungi and viruses. The singular autonomous voice gives way to a symbiotic interspecies chorus.

Chapter III: Self explores the intersection of biology and identity through dissections and non-figurative representations of the body, unravelling a plural, porous idea of agency.

In KINKE KOOI’s drawings the artist enlarges small subtleties to the level where viewing becomes a haptic experience. Her obsession with soft, undulating forms is evident in her sensuous, mesmerising works that in her own words prevent “the sharp from being sharp”.

HELEN CHADWICK's work of the 1980s focused on the female body in relation to a variety of props, exploring identity through autobiography, geometry, classical mythology and the natural world. Chadwick depicted her body, in photographic and sculptural installations, as aligned both with nature (landscape, the animal world, decay) and culture (geometry, architecture). The Meat Abstracts (1988) are a series of eight large format Polaroid photographs that Chadwick made at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1989. Chadwick laid materials such as suede, silk and wood veneer onto a table top, creating a field on which she arranged medleys of meat, offal and knives, brought together with light bulbs and gilded spheres and photographed from above. The series marked Chadwick’s move away from traditional forms of self-representation.

The title of JES FAN’s film Xenophoria, as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign, and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the eumelanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin colour – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies.

LEZLEY SAAR's oeuvre examines the complexities of identity through an exploration of the self as never singular or unchanging. This fragmentation is reflected by the variety of media that Saar utilises. Suspended between reality and fantasy, Saar conjures up mystical narratives populated by characters that draw on fable and mythology, addressing themes of identity, race, gender, beauty, normalcy and sanity. Her protagonists are frequently entangled with plant-life and vegetation, as their physical and cognitive experience of the world around them blur into singular compositions, suggesting a porous relationship between life-forms and the environments they inhabit.

AIMÉE PARROT's work combines multiple processes including printmaking techniques such as silk screening and mono printing, as well as batik and collaging fabric. By layering and repeating colour and form she creates a sense of off-kilter rhythm where solid and amorphous substances collide.

Approaching the surface of a painting as a metaphorical skin or permeable barrier, Parrot is interested in the notion that a work of art can bridge the gap between an internal reality and an external one; a physical manifestation and translation of experience. Her practice taps into an understanding of ecosystems and bodies, of our own corporeal nexus, of different forms of consciousness, and how the multifarious exchanges and interchanges across life can be understood with the sensitivity they necessitate.

"Primarily I think about painting as a way of being in contact with the world. I find it useful to approach the surface of a painting as a metaphorical skin, a permeable barrier. I am interested in the notion that a work of art can bridge the gap between an internal reality and an external one, that it can be a physical manifestation and a translation of experience. The importance of a direct encounter with the work is something I think about quite a lot, its material presence as an object is as crucial as its visual impact as an image."

- Aimée Parrott

Visit Chapter I: Space here and Chapter II: Skin here.