Under My Skin - NY Arts MagazineNY Arts Magazine

Curated by Carine Le Malet (from Le Cube Art Center), Under My Skin explores one’s relationship to the body, let it be on the inside or the outside. As Le Malet puts it, “This exhibition is about the representation and utilization of your body in order to question your relationship to others: what you choose to show about yourself, what other people perceive or imagine, the unvoiced comments, the despair, the charm, the indecision, the ambivalence of feelings….”

Marianne Maric, 2007. Video. Courtesy of Galerie Magda Danysz.

For the past two years the Magda Danysz gallery has been actively promoting video art through monthly video sessions. Last month a complete show Under My Skin was dedicated exclusively to this art form. Many of the video artists presented were also involved with conceptual art, performance, and experimental film. Each of the artists presented for the show an original video or video installation.

Curated by Carine Le Malet (from Le Cube Art Center), Under My Skin explores one’s relationship to the body, let it be on the inside or the outside. As Le Malet puts it, “This exhibition is about the representation and utilization of your body in order to question your relationship to others: what you choose to show about yourself, what other people perceive or imagine, the unvoiced comments, the despair, the charm, the indecision, the ambivalence of feelings….” Beauty, seduction, fears, and illness are all intertwined in a beautiful ballet of images in Under My Skin.

Young German artist Stefan Ringelschwandtner presented a very intimate set of videos talking about his illness, with beautiful music by Autechre. Artist Elodie Pong, who had won the Swiss Award, put her finger on a contemporary social phenomenon that compelled people in live shows and played with body appeal. Pong dressed up as a panda and performed some hilarious pole dancing, stating “I am a bomb.” Whether it’s a sex bomb or a psychological bomb—who knows? Marianne Maric was more melancholic as she tried to seduce the viewer in her videos, where she faced the viewer alone and showed her feelings in an intimate way. Corine Stübi’s work recreated a visual and conceptual environment from a cut-up of diverse sources like MTV, underground films, horror movies, gender theories, and the news. The proposed narrations are dramaturgies of the standard and banality while her characters are captive of medial loops.

All the artists were selected by Le Malet, who “enjoys playing with symbols, impressions, and obsessions about one another that leave the spectator troubled or scandalized” as she described herself. “This exhibition is like a collage functioning by a group of ideas with an eye to deconstruct and then reconstruct the stereotypes linked to the body in order to clarify them. These works are as much disturbing dreams that are at times tinted, as a humor that is more dark than rosy.”