Dreams Made Flesh
8 May — 26 June 2021
Galeria Catinca Tăbăcaru, Bucharest
Catinca Malaimare, Xavier Robles de Medina, Zoe Williams, Bruno Zhu
curated by Luís M. Araújo
Queer feelings may embrace a sense of discomfort, a lack of ease with the available scripts for living and loving, along with an excitement in the face of an uncertainty of where the discomfort may take us.
— Sara Ahmed, in ‘The Cultural Politics of Emotion’ (2004)
Dreams Made Flesh brings together works by four artists who explore, through queer perspectives, how we relate to our objects of desire.
Queer desire often attaches itself to everyday objects deemed illegitimate by normative society because their uses disrupt established understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Conceived around the idea that queerness can interrupt the repetition of a scripted life, the exhibition considers how objects become repositories for projection, pleasure, intimacy, and fantasy. Bringing together film, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, Dreams Made Flesh explores the emotional lives of things and the alternative forms of relation that emerge when objects resist normative expectations.
Catinca Malaimare premiered Eight of Clubs |♧|, a film in which she manipulates an LED photography light composed of eight articulated limbs joined by a circular core, a form that suggests both a spider and a wilting flower. The work creates a sensuous encounter, heightened by the sound of skin rubbing against plastic, as the artist stretches her body to its limits in order to grasp the object’s limbs. Intimacy between human and machine also appears in a series of new prints in which Malaimare poses with two Discoverer Space Helmet televisions from the 1980s. At times she confronts the viewer with a direct gaze; at others she appears withdrawn, looking elsewhere. Alongside the film and photographs, live performances reveal how anthropomorphic technologies captivate the senses and evoke emotions ranging from fear and fascination to desire and affection.
Xavier Robles de Medina has assembled a collection of found images drawn from online platforms and printed matter. Through processes of appropriation and erasure, these materials become part of his visual vocabulary as he strips away colour and subtly alters their form and texture. For Dreams Made Flesh, Robles de Medina translated two composites of four photographs into paintings. One, a portrait of Shakira during the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime Show, merges multiple views of the singer glaring at her audience. Through repetition, the painting transforms a familiar image of celebrity into an object of fascination that returns the viewer’s gaze. The other combines four images of domestic interiors containing only furniture and drapery. In the absence of people, the objects appear strangely animated, engaged in their own silent exchange. While one painting stages the intensity of human presence, the other imagines a conversation among things freed from their users.
Zoe Williams’s Sunday Fantasy (2019) is a film and installation inspired by a Roman perfume bottle encountered by the artist in the British Museum. Its protagonist, Veronica Malaise, is played by four different actresses, each interpreting the character in her own way and using the ancient vial to conjure intimate fantasies. Drawings, ceramics, and glass replicas of the bottle—originally produced as film props—extend the playful universe of Sunday Fantasy into the gallery. If social conventions have shaped our relationships with objects in ways that reinforce binary gender roles, Williams invites us, through seduction, fetishism, and witchcraft, to imagine desire otherwise.
Bruno Zhu‘s Joy (b. 2019) is a bar of soap resembling an egg on a feathery nest alongside cosmetic accessories kept in bespoke canvas pockets. Born in New York in 2019 and surrounded by beauty products, Joy is presented as a baby whose future appears to be mapped out through a series of gendered objects: beauty blenders, cuticle cutters, tweezers, and makeup brushes. The work humorously reflects the ways social expectations become attached to bodies from birth, exposing how seemingly ordinary objects participate in shaping identity, aspiration, and desire. By treating objects as active participants in the making of the self, Zhu reveals how desire is learned, rehearsed, and projected through the material world around us.
The four artists have contributed to a booklet published on the occasion of ‘Dreams Made Flesh’. Inspired by the Romanian tradition tăierea moțului, the publication shows a selection of objects on a silver tray, each embodying a secret desire by one of the artists.
click here to read and download the digital version of the booklet
press
Zile si nopti interview with Catinca Malaimare by Ioan Big
Zile si nopti interview with Xavier Robles de Medina by Ioan Big
arte vezi chronicle by Elena Ghițoiu
links
catincatabacaru.com/exhibitions/dreams-made-flesh
photos by Catalin Georgescu
exhibition images courtesy of Galeria Catinca Tăbăcaru, Bucharest
images of Zoe Williams works courtesy of Ciaccia Levi, Paris
Luís M. Araújo 