“BODY/PLAY/POLITICS” presents contemporary works of art that delve from a variety of angles into images that have been generated throughout history by “the body,” which encompasses the individual human body, our collective actions, and spiritual presences. There is a tendency in our society to label specific bodies as healthy or unhealthy, beautiful or ugly, and to envision certain modes of behavior as representative of the entire group, which we classify such as “typically Japanese.” In other cases, minor deviations from norms or expectations can elicit strange feelings in observers and cause entirely different meanings to be perceived.
In a world cohabited by people with all sorts of skin colors, ethnicities, religions, gender norms and lifestyles, where the colors, forms, or behaviors of individual bodies are not inherently vested with specific meanings, over the course of millennia many value judgments and hierarchies have arisen in societies and are all too often linked to tragedies of history.
The six artists featured in this exhibition are from Europe/ Africa, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Their works express, in poetic and sometimes humor-inflected ways, aspects of history that manifest themselves through the body, looking toward the future and bringing the shapes of new ideas and meanings into view.
Exhibition Catalogue
BODY/PLAY/POLITICS, Mochuisle, Inc., 2016
