A Tooth for aN Eye

Elena Filipovic

The painterly figures in the triptych by Mirjam Walter propel their interiors almost violently outward, suggesting bodies in which neat distinctions between interior and exterior, self and other, exuberance and containment, are volatile and unreliable.

Our bodies have a lot to be and do. They are biological battlegrounds, projection surfaces for fantasies, loci of individuality, and sites of political and social contention—manipulated, transformed, and increasingly commercialized. Despite their vulnerabilities, bodies are a kind of personal ur-architecture, structuring so much of how we experience the world, all while acting as powerful tools to mold the world in turn. The exhibition A Tooth for an Eye focuses on the representational outsides and the inscrutable insides of bodies, the dependencies they have (on other bodies as much as on supplemental objects) and the mutational possibilities open to them. The featured works dissolve the body into smoke, partition it into pieces, reveal the limits of its control, and examine the traces it builds and leaves behind. Like a body, the exhibition is not a stable entity, but transforms from room to room as visitors encounter works by sixteen artists from different generations working around the body—conceptually, archaeologically, experimentally, sensually, expressionistically.

With Camille Bres, Mona Broschár, Simona Deflorin, Gerome Gadient, Hannah Gahlert, Axel Gouala, Philipp Hänger, Dominik His, Jeronim Horvat, Daniel Kurth, Kaspar Ludwig, Ines P. Kubler, Claudio Rasano, Dorian Sari, Simone Steinegger, and Mirjam Walter.