A Surface Freak

Rey Akdogan, Camille Kingué & Raphaël Massart, Hanna Rochereau, Cammie Toloui, Perla Zúñiga

Nicoletti is pleased to present a group exhibition curated by Paris-based writer and curator Salomé Burstein. Between stages and mousetraps, display devices and peep-show booths, A surface freak brings together works that reveal the mechanisms behind what's made to meet the eye. Each piece negotiates nexuses of exposure and concealment, where visual pleasure often hinges on what remains out of sight.

"Borrowing its title from a phrase by artist Millie Wilson, A surface freak hints at perceptual mechanisms and manipulations. Whether entertainment culture, retail logics or the day-to-day image overflow, the artists all probe the aesthetic machinery of capitalism and its toll or effects on embodied life. Stages, skin, containers of all kinds become testing grounds for examining the production of desire, the circulation of value, the commodification of bodies or invisibilisation of labour. Through acts of subtraction, inversion, through spying and allure, the exhibition highlights the unsuspected and thrilling density of surfaces — a hidden manifoldness that ultimately places vision itself under scrutiny."

—Salomé Burstein