Body Building | 22.04.2021
image: video still from “Head, Self-Harm Fantasy”(2021) Jessica Dudziak
Body Building: On the Formation of the Individual, Political, and Empowered Self
A conversation with Kexin Hao, Jessica Dudziak and Sebastian Winkler on the body as site and vessel through which personal experiences of power, marginalization, sublimation, and cultural, gendered, and social pressures are negotiated.
The conversation will center around specific works of the artists:
"Full Body Workout" (2021) by Kexin Hao
"Head, Self-Harm Fantasy" (2021) by Jessica Dudziak
which can be viewed in advance here.
and the exhibition "Skóra spruta i krew popsuta (Skin is Soiled, Blood is Spoiled)" by Sebastian Winkler, which can be viewed on our website.
Thursday, 22.04, 19:00 GMT+2
The recording can be found here.
The Individual Self: An animated trainer performs a set of radio calisthenics (group exercises famously practiced in China). Docu-style anecdotes become interlaced with the instructor's body, which exaggerates and distorts like a Social Realist relief as she performs the movements. The humorous and ironic tone of the workout is framed by a karaoke-style soundtrack.
KEXIN HAO is a visual artist from Beijing and a graphic design student at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. Her practice largely based in performance and publicly engaged art. Her work is a constant swing between intimate, up-close and personal stories and a zooming-out to collective narratives; between a past of political heaviness and a flashy modernity rendered with humor and sarcasm.
The Political Self: A series of sculptures constructed with quotidian materials: expanding foam and paper printed with distorted images of the artists body. The conversation here happens on the surface of the ‘skin’, which is simultaneously the barrier and porous site of contamination, an organism shaped by social and cultural battlefields.
SEBASTIAN WINKLER is a visual artist working with objects, painting, installation and video. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and assistant in the Faculty of Painting, Winkler is also associated with the Institute of Public Space Research. Winkler co-curates exhibitions and events, and treats clumsiness and sloppiness as queer strategies for pushing the boundaries of imagination.
The Empowered Self: We watch as a face emerges from underneath a startlingly blank mask covering the entire head of the subject. The face is crudely revealed and then sewn and bound, we watch in tension as the procedure unfolds with an unsettlingly nervous energy which is only heightened by the metallic clanking of tools as the subject struggles to identify and implement.
JESSICA DUDZIAK is a multidisciplinary artist focusing in performative works, fashion, and object making, utilizing textiles and various aspects of the fashion industry to deal with cultural and sociological issues. Dudziak is graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the field of Media Art, the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in the field of Fashion Design, and the University of Life Sciences in Poznań in the field of Landscape Architecture.