What kind of interplay happens in touch - between our skin and the surfaces of objects in an external world? With a daily life full of superficial encounters, we never appear to be singular, separated beings — as in touching, we are always touched back. In meeting them, they often leave an impression on our skin, sometimes more than an outline, an exact negative, a trace, a reminder of something that has passed. In this sense, any touch operates exclusively as a contact of surfaces, as it does not come from the middle of the human being but rather operates on its margins.
This question, implying a double understanding of the skin — as a boundary that protects and maintains inner integrity and as a permeable, porous tissue capable of absorbing and secreting fluids — is at the heart of Surface Tension, a group exhibition featuring works by Isabella Benshimol Toro, Camille Yvert, Beatrice Vorster and Deividas Vytautas. The artists in the exhibition reflect upon ideas referring to physical touch and haptic touch and how the latter relates to different modes of looking. Calling for a proximity, the look can be seductive and almost intimate, and, on the other hand, unsettling, penetrated with a feeling of loss.
The material with which we stay in close unconscious contact most of the time is the soft surfaces of clothing and interior objects. Due to their inherent pliability and physical properties, they can easily retain traces of body - whether fingerprints or marks of other bodily parts hinting at its activity - a sweaty gym workout for example, or a beach sunbathing on a hot summer day. Used garments coated with epoxy resin in the works of Isabella Benshimol Toro serve as a monument to unconscious gestures of the body. Interested in the domestic daily life and the routines that hold it, she examines and creates intimate and mundane gestures which point out the social and political functioning of the body. In a new site-specific work, Isabella creates an ambiguous translucent space, neither clearly transparent nor fully opaque. Serving as a membrane between the main space of the gallery and a hidden small storage space, it enables us to look at the works on display as if they are feeling, breathing, sensing in this space of condensation.
Not every touch brings pleasure — the contact can also become a poisoning experience. In her new body of work Mercury retrograde, well me too Camille Yvert turns to mercurochrome. A topical antiseptic banished from several countries due to its high mercury content and the red stain it would leave on the skin, it also prevents doctors from distinguishing the injury. Leaving lilies in the water mixed with mercurochrome around the gallery, she allows them to soak up the mixture, which would eventually turn them red in a few days and thus reveal its poisonous effect. In a similar vein, in Sanguine (2024), the artist presents a lipstick made from mercurochrome. Once applied onto lips, it would leave a lasting effect, which eventually can be fatal for the human.
Another key semantic component of the show is haptic visuality. Formulated by media and film scholar Laura U. Marks as a multisensory experience that combines both the visual and tactile senses, haptic visuality is thus presented as a more active way of looking than a long-distance, optical vision. (1) Calling for a flow between sensuous closeness and symbolic distance, haptic visuality opens an orientation towards the sensual and affective dimension of looking, which Marks considers erotic. From active touching, reaching out and measuring of space, haptic aesthetics considers how we become touched and affected by things. This implies that the eye in haptic looking functions as an organ of touch and is more inclined to 'rest on the surface of an object rather than to plunge into its depth'. (2) In moving image works, haptic imagery fragments and magnifies the surfaces of bodies, objects, and environments through the camera's movement and proximity to those very surfaces, which pulls the viewer closer to it.
Heavily informed by the cinematic experience, the body of sonic and visual work of Beatrice Vorster reveals itself in a similar fashion. In having a closer look at sisters (2023), made from the footage from an Italian giallo (3) 'Phenomena' (1985) and featuring scenes of conflict, it is almost impossible recognise any specific features of women shown there. The grainy texture of images and multi-layered visual noises combined with richly textured sound pieces accompanying the videos make the overall footage more palpable. On the other hand, this looped, doomed- to-be never-ending story video evokes a sense of loss since we aren't given the opportunity to build frames into a single story. As if condensing the cinematic time, in unreliable bodies (2023) Beatrice places under vent the series of stills taken from the same film — but in this case, from a scene presenting an escape from the moment of tension.
Liberation, in a moment of catharsis. In softcore (bedroom scene) (2022), Deividas Vytautas presents a tender moment preceding a kiss between two lovers drawn from pornography still. The longing and desire build up before reaching a climax. Although the gesture is performed, according to Marks, gay pornography can provide a kind of look that may take some other relation to their object rather than just dominating. (4) As compared to the objectifying look taken from the perspective of heterosexual male viewer, that traditional cinema is still replete with, this can be a more ethical one, the one that would serve as an alternative to the possible ways of seeing a male body.
It is at this intersection of the subject of touch - understood both in the literal sense and as a kind of effect, which can be mediated by screen — that this exhibition is situated. Although approaching the subject of skin and touch from entirely different points of view, the artists have a shared interest in exploring alternative perspectives on the act of sensing — bodies, objects, and the world around us.
