An exhibition exploring the relationship between people and their bodies. The body is considered as a bearer of experience, an object of desire and a site shaped by social expectations.
I participated as artist and curator.
At Bereznitsky Aesthetics, I brought together Dasha Astafieva’s selfies, photographs by GORSAD, works by Oleg Kulik and my own drawings. Personal images, photography and drawing shared one space, each with a different way of showing the body.
In my drawings, fine lines meet vivid pink, green and blue marks. Human figures, animals, buildings and symbols come together in unexpected combinations. The gallery includes views of the exhibited works.
My Magic Home considers the body as a repository of information about social relationships and cultural values. The works are connected by a question about how we relate to our own corporeality, and how that relationship is shaped by the images of happiness, health and beauty that surround us.
Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s critique of consumer society, the curatorial text examines the body as an object of investment, pleasure and obligation. Caring for oneself can become a moral demand, while beauty and eroticism acquire the force of a new bodily ethics. The body appears simultaneously as something intimate and as a resource through which value is extracted.
The exhibition also questions the familiar opposition between body and soul. In contemporary mythology, the body can take on the promise of salvation once assigned to the soul. Its apparent liberation from the sacred may therefore produce another form of sanctification, rather than a straightforward release from constraint.