OFLUXO

From July to September, the underground space of catacombs situated beneath the Centre for Experimental Theatre is transformed into imaginary (in)human intestines. This environment serves as a scenic background for an international three-part exhibition project focusing on the topics of the human body and our unresolved relationship to our own physicality. Human body has been historically tied to an array of requirements, expectations and aesthetic norms. It is associated with categories of beauty, youth, health, and also their opposites, ugliness, aging, and illness. Despite the contemporary emancipation strategies, such as the body positivity movement and gender analysis, that are trying to free us from the dictates of these categories, we can view the human body from yet another perspective. As such, the human body is seen as an autonomous complex system of automatic processes including digestion, excretion, or blood circulation, which we only control to a little or no extent.
Spooky Butt presents the human body as a horror story in three acts. The first act, Bio-Organic, views the body itself as a source of anxiety and feelings of alienation. The terrors behind the mask of technological enhancement are revealed in the second act – Bio-Efficient. The final part, Co-Parasitic, shows us that our bodies can also be seen as a collective shell and it will hopefully offer a way out – just as spooky as the rest. The individual site-specific exhibitions together with the programme of side events aim to create a shared body of the exhibiting artists and the participants of the exhibition.

In the catacombs, complete bodies will go through a staged digestive organ and encounter artworks as well as performances that depict the somatic digestion mentioned above so as to confront unfamiliar feelings of embodiment and react to horrific notions of physical shapes. In this internal path, the visitor shall undergo a self-examination of their organic components that are hidden from plain sight.

How can we visualise the organic, the somatic and the digestive?
Or do we have to accept that a part of us remains in the dark?

In her paintings, Kinke Kooi creates diagrams of these processes that immerse the viewers in an imaginative space of transpersonal levelling – a space that is confronted by the gorish explicitness of Csaba Kis-Róka. These two-dimensional works break on the concave rooms and carve out a tunnel where the sculptural invocations of Chin Tsao dialogue with the mystic characters of Marek Delong and Anna Slama. In between, you will find Kea Bolenz´s fine-line works that encapsulate entities in the act of transgressing these dimensions.

In her spoken word performance, Markéta Wagnerová explores the outcomes of somatic repetition. Daphna Horenczyk will fill the nooks and crannies the hollow organ has to offer with her and Jolyane Langlois’ translation of internal processes into body movements while Denise Palmieri will unfold the sensitive surfaces of the underground path to digest not matter, but the geological and architectural history of the site itself.