Like a Punch to the Guts

Dèsirèe Nakouzi De Monte & Andrea Parenti of Collezione Nancy, Delroi, Keunmin Lee, Shahryar Nashat, Steve Reinke, James Richards, Sibylle Ruppert, Diane Severin Nguyen

A heavy thud. A sharp sting. A flash of bright light. The momentary blindness that surely follows. Delivered hard enough, a simple punch can fully shut down the body, arriving soon enough at a permanent final destination. If a deep, rippling shockwave is enough to disrupt the normal functioning of an organism, could the same be said of these works? The anxiety-riddled materiality of an image, with all its synthetic fleshiness interrupted by the occasional glitch, contaminates its surroundings. Provoking a radiating pain in bodies without borders, a haptic seeing that weighs down on the nervous system’s pressure points, it frees form and images from the constrictions and stranglehold of meaning. We should be so lucky.