mechanisms of seduction, economies of exposure

mechanisms of seduction, economies of exposure This exhibition consciously rejects the habitual casting of feminized bodies as objects of seduction. Instead, it investigates the economies of exposure itself, questioning what is revealed, what is concealed, and the power dynamics inherent in looking. The artists employ fragmentation, industrial materiality, and assertive forms of the gaze to deconstruct objectification and chart an odyssey of the body's autonomy. The hardness of metal, the brightness of steel, the warmth of wood and neon, and the wafer-thin veneer of surface are employed to challenge our perceptions of the body's symbolic strengths and vulnerabilities. Each fracture, weld, and suture becomes a deliberate act of forging impulse and of releasing tensions. The works do not conceal their making; they do not hide, but mimic with their own inanimate structures those affects conventionally codified outside ourselves. Whereas Gelzis’s bird-like sculpture Leftover Flower repurposes discarded metal to inscribe new physical and metaphorical meaning onto the process of re/production itself, Heidhues’s sculpture Untitled (saddle) embraces a radically libidinal discontinuity as its inherent condition. Emmerich’s oil paintings, with their controlled and mesmerizing shapes, render fragmented anatomies as a multiplying celestial presence that feels both sheltered and at risk. From within our ever-expanding digital and mechanical landscape, a bodily presence pulsates within each work, reaching out. Through these acts of exposure and a sensuous use of materials, we are made to feel what is like to be seen. As we glide across the surfaces of the works, we become aware of our own layers of resistance. They arrive already coated in the public’s projections. Here, seduction is not an objectifying lure but a shared dress-rehearsal of approach and withdrawal, a deliberate back-and-forth between viewer and viewed that reveals what would otherwise remain covered.