STATES OF REBIRTH
BODY IMAGES IN MOTION

This exhibition STATES OF REBIRTH examines the correlation between the body, movement and societal structures in physical and digital spaces, through a focus on documentary and conceptual projects in contemporary Performance-, Portrait and Dance-Photography.

As a choreography – of photographs concerning of the relationship between bodies in motion – this exhibition explores how our attitudes, gestures and affectations at once reflect, configure and transform how we negotiate societal change. In particular, how our normative, algorithmic visual culture – and its discerning, deriding gaze – is visible in our restless bodies: how they move; how they slouch, grope, evade or repell; how they sink; or how they stand tall; suppose a gesture, strike a pose; how they influence and reflect each other; how they grasp for connection.

Performance and photographic approaches ask how we might dive deep, descend through ourselves and hone in on the basis of our self-empowerment (Isaac Chong Wai); or if, through the making and unmaking of the algorithmic gaze into its constituent parts, we can reconstruct them anew (Moshtari Hilal).

Experiences of migration, marginalisation and social exclusion shape our body language, our perception of the self and the other. Artists like Felipe Romero Beltrán, Roxana Rios and Farren van Wyk have developed new artistic principles in their ‘Body Images’ to explore the relationship between personal experience and socio-political dynamics. In doing so, they question our power structures, identity, belonging, matters of the refugee experience and the colonial gaze, and how they might all be redirected in the body as sources of empowerment, resistance and transformation – like rearranging our posture.

STATES OF REBIRTH traces how our understanding of the gaze – from one body to another, the seer to the seen – has reversed. As Moshtari Hilal formulates it in her poetic, autobiographic and analytically precise visual essay Hässlichkeit (Ugliness, 2023): “The gaze has turned: it is not those who are looked at who are ugly, but those who look with the intention to dehumanize.“

Which images are privileged by the algorithm, and which artistic practices can reorder, subvert and transform its gaze? STATES OF REBIRTH: BODY IMAGES IN MOTION brings current practices into urgent dialogue.

Artists:
Khing Wai Bei, Felipe Romero Beltrán, Moshtari Hilal, Naomi Lulendo, Ana Maria Sales Prado, Roxana Rios, Aykan Safoğlu, Isaac Chong Wai, Farren van Wyk

Curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Curator House of Photography.