Paul Barsch & Tilman Hornig, Cecilia Bengolea & Jeremy Deller, Johanna Bruckner, Noëmi Ceresola, El Pelele, Nagi Gianni & Raphaëlle Müller, Hajj, Gabriel Junqueira, Martin Kohout, Martina Mächler, Ingo Niermann, Stella, Sinae Yoo
Curated
by Doris Dehan Son & Simon W Marin
Hard Body Soft Core is an online exhibition that opens on 8 May 2020 and lasts until the physical space of Body Archive Project in Zurich reopens. The selection of videos, images, sound and text works are presented in a digital landscape specially designed by Esther Hunziker, which the visitors are invited to roam in order to generate a plurality of associations and meanings. The seemingly simple, yet excessively vast interface plays with the idiosyncrasy of online spatiality and builds on the limitations of perception through the screen to create a somewhat frustrating feeling of disorientation. This intentional refusal of intuitive design snubs user-friendliness in a meditation on the recent inflation in uninspired solutions for pseudo-exclusive online art experiences while simultaneously questioning the lurking temptation of illusionism in interactive design.
Hard Body Soft Core is a group exhibition in which the technical lingo becomes a metaphor to speak about our current physical and emotional estrangement. In line with Body Archive Project’s exploration of the body beyond its fleshy materiality, the exhibition settles in the breach between notions of embodiment and disembodiment to reflect on the substantiality of discarnate feelings and other forms of extracorporeal experiences. In Hard Body Soft Core, the exhibited artworks challenge the finitude of the self and emotional reality in terms of the individual body: they emerge from the cracks when sensitivity seems to exceed corporeality and expand beyond the physical envelope. Or when emotions become more tangible than touch.
