The event will be in Hungarian.

Free entrance, all are welcome.

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Soaking in Each Other / Endocrine Regimes

On view: 18 January - 2 March 2025

Exhibiting artists: Lucy Beech, Szilvia Bolla, Aliza Orlan, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger

Curated by Judit Szalipszki  

The exhibition Endocrine Regimes - Soaking in Each Other explores the enmeshment of hum/animal bodies, technologies, and the pharmaceutical and health industries - in a material sense - through the works of artists who focus on the malleable boundaries of bodily existence and the socio-political consequences of biotechnologies. Their practices question the understanding of the body as a separate, autonomous entity, and see it as a dynamic constellation with porous boundaries, constantly changing and intraacting, fluctuating, allowing space for the flow of materials and meanings, influenced by environmental, technological and social factors.

The exhibition pays particular attention to hormonal processes, the hormonal micro-mediation of our physical and mental states. Hormones are the body's chemical messengers, determining many bodily functions, including our appetite, sleep patterns, stress tolerance, libido, fertility, strength, anxiety and mood. The management of our hormones has come a long way in the last century: some hormone treatments have provided us with significant benefits, but some aspects of their use have had and continue to have controversial consequences. Knowledge about hormones, the history of interventions in our bodies' hormonal systems, has both recreated and reframed our ideas about human and more-than-human bodies and health, as well as gender.

The works on display in the exhibition reflect on the notion of fluidity in both material and metaphorical terms. Fluids leave bodies and ooze and seep through to other bodies, they get absorbed into the skin, purified through minerals, materials are extracted from it and it is enriched with additional supplements. These materials are then extracted and capitalized further on. They ebb and flow through narrower and wider conduits and tunnels. They pass through the innermost parts of the body – arteries, oesophagus, fallopian tubes, the gastrointestinal tract, through instruments and devices, through the sewage system as waste material. The boundaries between the human and the more-than-human, between bodies and landscapes, between genders become increasingly blurry and obscured. In this regime, transience and liminality is the default state: between the realms of the curative and the toxic, the legal and the illegal, the organic and the synthetic, between reality and dystopia. As Donna Haraway puts it, the contemporary  world is constituted by an implosion of the technical, organic, political and the economic.

What kind of newly assembled subjectivities arise as a consequence of the dissolution of these boundaries? What does it feel like to exist as composite, fragmented entities, managed through chemicals and augmented by techno-organic extensions? Who are we in these constellations with often uncertain outcomes? How do we navigate this system, what are the mental repercussions of these bodily shifts, and how can our agency be enacted in these liminal states? How do we co-exist with them and what are we becoming together with them?

Supported by: National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Káli Kövek, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands

Image: Lucy Beech: Flush, 4K video, 2023 | Image courtesy the artist