Private View: Wednesday, 15th of October 2025, 6 - 8pm
Berlin, Germany
Fragmented body parts, twisting torsos, masked and floating faces. Body Archive brings together three
artists whose practices variously explore the female body as site, surface and symbol. Drawing on art
history, mythology, and contemporary representations of femininity, the works in this exhibition examine
the complexities of selfhood, desire, memory and the performance of identity.
Emily Pope's tightly cropped paintings place us in the unsettling role of the voyeur, as if we are peering
through a letterbox or observing a peep show, catching glimpses of a body that feels both familiar and
strange. This is especially true in the work depicting a voluptuous, milky torso and exposed breasts. The
body here is an archetype, derived from a compilation of art historical references and the artist's personal
archives - a form we feel we've encountered before, but can't quite place. Similarly, paintings of a
woman's raised collarbones and tightly corseted body evoke a haunting sense of recognition, even as the
context for these figures is deliberately stripped away, leaving us to fill in the gaps. These works invite us
in, only to hold us at arm's length, challenging us to reflect not only on the long history of women's
objectification, but also on how cultural symbols endure, even as their meanings unravel.
The question arises: is the body performing for us, or is it our perspective that shapes the image? Or
perhaps it is a combination of both. Pope's paintings ask us to confront the difficulty of transcending
inherited ideas of the female form, while also questioning how these symbols continue to shape our
understanding of identity.
Makiko Harris's work also grapples with the cultural and social expectations placed on the female body.
New works from her ongoing Stocking Series envision ambiguous fleshy body parts bulging against what
first appears to be fishnet tights, but closer inspection reveals a rigid layer of galvanized steel. What might
initially be read as a fetishized or vulnerable body becomes, instead, a deliberate manipulation of
visibility and concealment. The steel netting replaces the softness of traditional lingerie, transforming the
act of revealing into an assertion of control, autonomy and resistance. In this shift, Harris critiques the
longstanding commodification of the female form, asserting that what is visible is not always a passive
invitation, but an active negotiation of how the body is framed and understood.
For the first time, Harris also extends this line of research through portraits where the steel netting
becomes a mask, simultaneously concealing the figure and hinting at layers of unconscious beneath.
Again, the use of steel suggests that visibility - or the withholding of it - can be an act of power. In
choosing what to reveal and what to hide, Harris invites us to reflect on the autonomy of self-presentation
in a world where the female body remains subject to constant scrutiny.
A collection of sculptures by Manuela Benaim - faces cast in silicone and sealed in resin - also
considers the ways in which the body is dissected. Frozen in time, these faces become vestiges of
discarded selves or portraits of a moment just before transformation. They are fragmented recollections of
a life paused mid-flow - perhaps even fragments of lives we almost lived, futures that never happened,
now suspended in transparent stillness. Benaim's use of silicone, a material that mimics skin, and resin,
which both preserves and erases, explores the tension between memory and transformation. The faces,
preserved yet unable to evolve, serve as a meditation on the fragility of identity, as well as the cyclical
nature of selfhood: ever-changing, yet always haunted by what it leaves behind.
In this way, Body Archive invites us to interrogate how our understanding of and relation to the
female body is not only shaped by history and culture, but how we might also find space for
reclamation, resistance and reimagining.