How does the body take shape under pressure?

Hosted by Queer Museum Vienna in partnership with Volkskundemuseum, How does the body take shape under pressure? brings together an international group of contemporary artists whose works are coming from the myriad experiences of pressure and questioning the dynamics of unproportional forces. Working between the lines of passive and defensive, social and intimate, pressure and pleasure; the exhibition presents artists’ allegorical positions to ponder upon political repression against queer&feminist existences. In the exhibition, we witness the bodies that are unbalanced, hanged, knocked down, cornered, pushed, and pressed against; we also see objects: forms of pleasure, protection, and of ferocity that are activated on flesh by pushing or protecting the corporal limits. Artists’ works in the exhibition are creating intimate scenes mimicking society’s mechanics, unfolding intertwined narratives, posing primal and peripheral questions: How does political coercion manifest itself on a single body? How parallel run the power dynamics in our sexual practices to the societal ones? How does one transgress the pressure without pushing back? The bodies in the exhibition are in grip but they do not follow gestures of active resistance, assertive defense, or antagonism; instead, the bodies under pressure let themselves be pressed; are they submissively disobeying and taking pleasure or practicing and acknowledging helplessness? How does the body shape under pressure? creates a space of reflections on negotiating the pressure within the intertwined structures of social, sexual, and political. The exhibition, within the setting of a folklore museum, suggests a queer critique of material culture and museum-making and questions how much violence and desire are being stored in the body and how much of a body can fit in a museum.