Soaking in Each Other / Endocrine Regimes
Opening: 17 January 2025 (Friday) 7pm
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.
What kind of newly assembled subjectivities arise as a consequence of the dissolution of the boundary between the organic and the synthetic? 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?
Supported by: National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Káli Kövek, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
