Exhibition Details
The skin is intimate and exposed at once. Even as it envelops the body and connects to internal organs, it remains external, open to the world as a threshold where the self meets other.
Skins, Not Our Own begins from this paradox. What does skin retain? Where does it begin, and where does it end? What happens when the body’s outermost layer is peeled away, stretched, or displaced and becomes a material in its own right? The exhibition brings together three artists—Heidi Bucher, Rebecca Horn, and Kimsooja—each of whom brings the body’s surface to the fore.
Skins, Not Our Own begins from this paradox. What does skin retain? Where does it begin, and where does it end? What happens when the body’s outermost layer is peeled away, stretched, or displaced and becomes a material in its own right? The exhibition brings together three artists—Heidi Bucher, Rebecca Horn, and Kimsooja—each of whom brings the body’s surface to the fore.
Additional Details
Feminist theorist Luce Irigaray observed that our ways of speaking and seeing often follow a masculine logic of control and definition. To exist otherwise, Irigaray insists, women must invent a different language—fluid, elliptical, meandering. Women, she writes, are “enveloped in proper skins, but not our own.” This exhibition references that line in its title and takes up its charge.
Across works on paper, sculpture, and performance, Bucher, Horn, and Kimsooja foreground the bodily surface as porous and unstable, made tangible through architectural skins, prosthetic extensions, and strands of hair. To shed skins “not our own” is to loosen the forms that have defined us, and in doing so, to imagine what other bodies and subjectivities might emerge.
Across works on paper, sculpture, and performance, Bucher, Horn, and Kimsooja foreground the bodily surface as porous and unstable, made tangible through architectural skins, prosthetic extensions, and strands of hair. To shed skins “not our own” is to loosen the forms that have defined us, and in doing so, to imagine what other bodies and subjectivities might emerge.
Location
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts
615 West 129th Street
New York, NY 10027
Image: Heidi Bucher, “Bodyshells, Venice Beach,” video still, 1972. / courtesy of Wallach Art Gallery