The experience of trauma, whether actual or imagined, can lead to a variety of peculiar and unexpected outcomes. The distorting effect on body image, defined as a person's feelings of the aesthetics and sexual attractiveness of their own body that may be forced by culture or their surroundings, can be particularly strong. In Anatomy of Anxieties, the body however is conceived not only in terms of human flesh and bone, but metaphorically. It can be seen to encompass the steel and glass structure of a building, or the landscape as living organism, both forms of bodily representation are equally subject to being the site of fantasy, trauma and perversion.

Taken as a departure point for this exhibition, these phenomena are explored through the works of a broad generation of artists including Hans Bellmer, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Beth Collar, Patrizio Di Massimo, Laurent Grasso, Andy Holden, Tetsumi Kudo, Rachel Maclean, Superflex, Cindy Sherman and Cui Ximing.

Traversing between dark humour and deadpan irony, and at times morbid, and other times playful fascination with the instruments (CCTV surveillance, broadcast television, the Stora Enso Building in Helsinki, Finland), and instrumentalised subjects of control, the works in the exhibition dissect the fantasies and dominant cultural narratives we tell ourselves, while pointing to not only how such representations of the self begin to crack under the strain of their own artifice, but what possibilities might lie beyond the psyche’s breaking point.

-Edouard Malingue Gallery

Image courtesy of Edouard Malingue Gallery