Ink in Milk

The exhibition Ink in Milk traces how vulnerability can give rise to new modes of resistance. The works on display spring from different yet equally challenging life experiences: some grapple with the conditions shaped by disability or illness, while others open onto the fragile yet insistent – intimate, personal, and political – realities of exhaustion and motherhood. The exhibition approaches vulnerability not as an individual failing but as a social condition. As Canadian philosopher Shelley Tremain – whose work draws on feminist critical disability studies –writes: "Seniors and elders (...) aren’t inherently vulnerable; nor are disabled people in institutions inherently vulnerable. Both of these groups (among others) are rendered vulnerable. That is, they are made vulnerable. Vulnerability isn’t a characteristic that certain individuals possess or embody. Like disability, vulnerability is a naturalized apparatus of power that differentially produces subjects, materially, socially, politically, and relationally.” In the works on display, the body emerges as an archive of constantly shifting relationships. Rather than focusing on resolving physically or mentally demanding situations, the works illuminate strategies and tactics that disrupt the hierarchies embedded within them. Beyond questions of recovery or coping, they seek to reclaim personal agency, confront ambivalences without necessarily resolving them, and develop a language for narrating new situations – rooted in the personal yet shaped by the broader social context. The exhibition highlights how various imaging strategies and photographic techniques – X-rays, thermal imaging, ultrasound – often used in medical or other power-laden contexts, can become effective tools for articulating and presenting personal narratives that take shape in and through the body. It invites us to consider how these methods, typically bound to institutional authority, can be reclaimed as forms of self-assertion. Within this framework, fragility appears not as a weakness but as a resource; illness, mental strain, or exhaustion are not merely passive states but potential sites of resistance, where slowing down or withdrawing can itself be a political act. The works also bring to light experiences that are often taboo, hidden, masked, or suppressed: the contradictory realities of motherhood, the shame of mental breakdown, the sensory divergences stemming from disability, or the sight of a body marked and exhausted by medical intervention. Alongside questions of representation, visibility itself emerges as a central concern. Individuals whose lives or capacities diverge from normative expectations frequently oscillate between hypervisibility and invisibility. Hypervisibility, in this context, means being excessively scrutinized – becoming an object of attention, even a spectacle – where difference is reduced to a single defining feature, such as disability framing the way society perceives the individual. Invisibility, by contrast, denotes not being seen at all: the exclusion of non-normative bodies from public spaces, media, cultural representation, and the social imagination. Their experiences, needs, and bodily realities are often ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. The oscillation between these two poles highlights the instability inherent in non-normative lived experience – not a simple binary, but a continually shifting dynamic in which the individual is never fully visible or invisible, moving instead along a spectrum of exposure, blurring, and erasure depending on the context.