Seagrass swaying in water, caressing ankles, tickling skin. Drops finding their way downward, downward into unknown depths. Bare metal, glittering and promising, cold and hard, piercing membrane. Pain becoming pleasurable, shuddering, expansive; roughness turning into visual delight. Flowing in streams from above, rounded soft limbs, hard small beads, chains, kneading nips make their way. Surfaces appear as versatile, malleable spaces, depths that open up, bodies emerging before the eye. Pressing and devouring, rising and expanding, questioning and hurting, sensing and sweating, tasting and spitting out, never complete.
The soft sculpture We Suddenly Discover To Be Ourselves by Theresa Weber inhabits the space in an uneven, downward-drifting yet simultaneously uplifting form. Three body-like strands composed of diverse materials: textile shaped into spherical forms, braided or filled; long bead-like sequences of wood and plastic; and modelling mass pressed into fabric. They exist as possibilities of different arrangements, refusing a fixed form - they flow, stream, and intertwine. In this movement, softness tips into tension, into incision and opening, into a cold yet playful resonance. In the leather surfaces connected by piercings in Simone Karl's Prick and Pride and Rohrschachtest, bodies become per-meable, vulnerable, and at the same time charged with pleasure. They adhere to walls, connected and penetrated by (coloured) piercings. In Head full of Windchimes, tongues and lip presses, dila-tors, screws, and nuts condense into a system that begins to move like a wind chime. In the tension between pain and pleasure, an inner space of resonance emerges. A threshold between in- and out-side. In the painting The weed is creeping up their feet by Aura Roig, a figure sits between sky and water, open and unbothered. Their gaze is neither inviting nor rejecting. While the sky glows in shades of yellow and green, they remain in contact with the ground of the water. Seagrass wraps around their ankles; they are positioned between surface and depth. Despite their openness, they withdraw from a possessive gaze and assert their own presence. This shift continues in Roig's further works. In Tired of the male gaze or Sweating or Crying, the body itself becomes a carrier of gaze and inquiry; perception is shifting.
Bone to Skin to Body to Touch remains legible, remains in motion: from the inner to the surface, from material to perception, from distance to touch. Bodies appear as permeable states continu-ously re-forming through contact.
Leonie Kennedy