part of Dirty Art Department group show ‘The spit of HURELONASM was many things’
poster design by Aron Lodi and Lecxi Doumer
Dirty Art Department group show „The Spit of The HURELONASM Was Many Things” with 9 dirty monsters.
Special thanks to Theo Dietz and Mike Moonen for technical and practical support.
Agony, and De-alienation, 2023, Mixed media installation
Transmissions of the morbid
(on how to exorcise the disorderly)
Pipes open, morbid, uncanny. The ground is exposed, the soil is unexplored; cartographies of the vulgar or noble or both. Pipes are metaphors; they can move things around, let liquids flow, allow for organisms to grow, alter, transform. They are entrances and exits, vessels and mediators of both life and death; they are unseen forces keeping physical and mental spaces neat and clean and safe; they are portals that if brought into surface, they would expose us to our own otherness, triviality, morbidness.
And that’s the exact reason why we keep them hidden, covering them behind walls and closed doors, avoiding encounters with their existence, functionality or decay. Through her new body of work, Seulbin engages with this exact efforts of human beings to dismiss what comes from or through the gut. Her installation is an invitation to explore the symbolisms and healings that come with a realization of such a dismissal. It aims to make us see pipes as a vessel for what resists to be part of a social construct that excludes the non rationalized. How can we speak through that which has been denied permission to form or affect our personal and professional
decisions? How can we let that which has been violated and muzzled, just because its utterances were unintelligible, alter our reality? How pipes can be used as a parable for learning how to speak the yet unspoken? Her work takes the risk and cope with the consequences of exposing mental breaks, triggers, infantile agonies, depressions, neurodivergent constructions as schemes, carrying a demonized semantic burden. It brings them to light, allowing us, human beings and audiences, to see through them, touch their presence and eventually relief our personal and collective wounds from the baggage of historically imposed and perpetuated taboos.
Exhibition Text Author : Ioanna Gerakidi
Let’s we take a closer look into the metaphoric circular system of our brain, gut, and body. The mental context and the medical context are closely connected to the social context and the political context. This association, which we imagine as our body, has a tremendous impact on the concepts of „otherization‟ and „alien‟. Our bodies are fixed and complete, and we protect ourselves. However, when this is combined with the concept of hygiene, those who fall into this category of 'others', that is, those defined as abnormal, are recognized as threatening the health of ‘normal’ people. They fear that they will become infected if they come into contact with other „strangers‟, „refugees‟, „sexual minorities‟ and „patients‟. These problems go beyond the fear of individuals and extend to the politics of a society and a country.
‘Toilet’ or ‘excretion’ is usually avoided in polite conversation, bodily excretions are nonetheless distinctly social issues, heavily influenced by the surrounding societal behavioural norms and shared ideas.
When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. Why is disgust so crucial to power?