body mould: Curated by Maddalena Iodice

We are containers to be contained, hormones to be regulated, saved from the dysfunctionality of our ambiguous bodies. We are subject to the emotional, the sensuous, the erotic, the manifestation of invisible energies, and hence hysterical, monstrous bodies. How, then, to rule the uncanny? How to keep it concealed? Our monotheist, phallocentric Western cultural system did so by imposing a binary language and exclusive system of representation for us to define ourselves with. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. 1 Fragmented and stigmatised, we then might ask ourselves to what degree is disgust towards our bodies innate or learned?2 We are mould to be bleached when we don’t fit, when we bleed, when we are not “natural”, when we lack, when we overflow. If we are unknowable, we are unthinkable, then uncontrollable. Yet mould is a fungi, its murky organic matter inherently alive and capable of infinite generative power. It has a language of its own that allows its mycelium and its spores to communicate, sustain each other, and exist. 

We shall learn from the earthly organic matter that surrounds us. We shall reclaim our mould, our unruly flesh, our monstrosity, our unsettling erotic power. We shall overflow and propagate endlessly. Body Mould is an invitation to tear apart, reveal  our innermost depths and in doing so reclaim our uncanny bodies, our language, creating words of our own to speak our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. 3 Hailing from different countries, paths, and artistic journeys, the emerging and early-career artists presented in the exhibition confront stigmas through their own situated perspective. Their urge to constitute a visual language that expresses the truths and fluctuations of their own bodily experience, situates them in a lineage of artists whose pioneering practices paved the way for subaltern voices to exist in our culture and in the history of art. 

1 Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.2 Elkin, Lauren, “Art Monsters: Unruly bodies in feminist art”, Vintage, 2024 

3 Lorde, Audre, “Sister Outsider “, Penguin Classics, 2019 

From Georgia O'Keeffe who used voluptuous painterly gestures as words to her relationship to the earthly landscape she was surrounded by, to Ana Mendieta who laid down on the earth, floated in water, evoking through her bodily traces the universal energy that runs through insects, humans and plants alike. I think of Loie Fuller and Rebecca Horn, whose performative interventions saw their limbs lengthened, extended as if in the attempt of taking up space. Maria Lassing articulated the experience of inhabiting a body through a series of self-portraits rooted in what she called “body awareness”, while Claudette Johnson’s images of Black women like “And I Have My Own Business in This Skin” (1982) affirmed the Black subject outside of a colonialist perception of Blackness. Helen Chadwick’s research on gender led her to question Western dual oppositional structures creating representations that leave space for ambiguity and a disquieting sexuality. Almost ten years after her “Enfleshings” series (1989), which to Chadwick embodied selfhood as conscious meat, Sarah Lucas was using humour to unearth obscene paradoxes created by patriarchal constructions, while Marlene Dumas was portraying the human figure in exploration of themes of race and gender, sensuality and violence, personal and public identities. And yet, the urgency of finding materials to transcribe the body and foster its own language is still here. 

Fast forward, the list goes on: 

Isabella Benshimol Toro’s “Painting about old me” (2024), suggests an entrance point, and a potential trajectory to experience the show. Here, a discarded window from a British council house is the frame for a composition of resin-coated used clothing. Losing their original purpose, jumpers, pants and shirts become painterly gestures, visceral fluctuations that seem to expose the chaos of human existence. In Melania Toma’s research, organs, bones, flowers, spores, and bacteria move to the rhythm of a synchronous dance. “Door I” from the “Doors of the Kagneji” series (2024) and “Small Decomposer” (2024), articulate the interconnectedness of organic matter and play as a reminder that human and other-than-human animacies are one. We are one with our mould. One with the earth. 

“Loins” (2024), by Kesewa Aboah, poses a visual synecdoche, where the loins echo the body as a whole. The body itself becomes a mark, a physical gesture on canvas, the pressure of flesh and bones registered in dry pigments and walnut oil. The imprints, traces of the artist’s body or the presence of friends and loved ones, part of Aboah’s community, constitute a threshold between personal and universal corporeality. Blurring the lines between painting and ready-made sculpture, “Unhook me” (2024), by Paula Parole, is wrapped in fishnet tights, which, leaving an aperture on the canvas surface, show the back of a figure wearing a black lace bra. Parole cleverly plays with constructed notions of seduction and gender roles offering a witty take on the codes of constriction the female body has been subject to. Poetically contrasting such a state, Paula Zvane lets a hair-like sculpture creep through the

space in the form of what resembles a lace tapestry. “Hair lace” (2024), made of hardened organic linen fibres is to the artist a bodily extension, an act of self-affirmation thinking anew the way we make space and propagate our presence and our erotic energy. 

The erotic is not a question of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.4 The research of Giuditta Vettese responds to the urge of listening to our innermost pulsations. The series “Interno Astratto” (2024), (Abstract Insides, 2024) represents an instinctual vocabulary to articulate the process of becoming attuned to our primordial, ecstatic energy; and the bronze sculpture “La Fiamma che non Brucia” (2024), (The Flame that does not Burn, 2024) a pagan altar for these mystical forces to be evoked, to manifest. 

To express the body is to be able to confront ourselves, to be vulnerable, to be naked, to be flesh. Just like in Inès Michelotto's self-portrait “The way I feel at times” (2024), which closing the show powerfully evokes the words of French writer and critic Helene Cioxus: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing”.

Kesewa Aboah, 1994, London, U.K. 

Kesewa Aboah considers the body not merely as a subject, but as a potent medium for exploring the intricacies of human experience. Her bodily-printed embroideries and etchings blur the boundaries between the personal and the universal, the ephemeral and the enduring, creating a space where viewers can engage with the fundamental questions of existence. 

Aboah lives and works in London. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2017). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at 12.26, Texas (2024), Incubator 23, London (2023); The Armory Show, 12.26, New York (2022), as well as group presentations at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, London (2023); Christie's London, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2021). Aboah was an artist in residence at ArtsIceland in Isafjordur, Iceland in 2018. 

Isabella Benshimol Toro, 1994, Caracas, Venezuela 

Isabella Benshimol Toro’s practice draws from performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Working primarily with used clothing, epoxy resin, silicone, and other domestic or personal found objects, her work seeks to freeze in time ephemeral actions, gestures, and sensations of everyday domestic life. Through her subtle reflection on the mundane, the intimate, the vulnerable, Toro constitutes a series of timeless monuments to the unconscious. 

Benshimol Toro lives and works in London. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2020 and a BA from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, in 2016. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: ‘Rinse and Hold’ at Zerui gallery, London (2024); ‘Sketches’ curated by Mathilde Friis and Gonzalo Herrero, London (2024); ‘No Future’ at Triangolo Gallery, Cremona (2024); ‘Surface Tension’ at Des Bains, London (2024); ‘The Sundown of Disquiet’ at Zerui, London, curated by Domenico de Chirico (2023); ‘Everything I Do Could Be Done Differently’ at Cecilia Brunson Projects curated by Piloto Pardo, London (2022); ‘SEX’ at Rose Easton, London (2022); ‘Reconfigured’ at Timothy Taylor Gallery, New York, curated by Rose Easton (2021); ‘Descripción de un estado físico’ at Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid (2021), and ‘El Dormitorio’ at CCC Centro del Carmen de Cultura Contemporánea, Valencia (2021). She has also been a resident at Good Eye Projects, London (2024), and Rupert, Vilnius (2022).

Inès Michelotto, 1997, Padova, Italy 

Inès Michelotto is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is nurtured by the diversity of London's cultural environment, the vibrancy of the queer community and the city’s hedonistic rave scene. Empowerment and self-expression lay at the core of Michelotto's artistic research which ranges from costume design for theatre and cinema, to drawing and painting. Her impulse originates from the urge to articulate the bodily experience and examine her own image. Delving into the nuances of gender, Michelotto’s art celebrates the queer community, acknowledging the individuals who, dear to the artist, have been central to her personal growth. Defined by a vibrant painterly paste her figurative canvases invite the viewer into the nuances of an intimate reality that is often overlooked. 

Michelotto lives and works in London. Recent group shows include ‘Girlhood Lore’ at Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio, Todi, Italy (2024), ‘Museum of Sex’ at Duende Art Gallery, London (2024), ‘On lines’ at ICA, London (2024), ‘Edged, an ode to Mapplethorpe’ at Black White Gallery, London (2023). 

Paula Parole, 1992, Saarbrücken, Germany 

Parole owns her story and acknowledges the power of self-discovery and narration. Lying at the core of her practice, poetic humour plays as fil-rouge across her vibrant and eclectic production where memories and future projections interplay. Drawing from both self-fiction and auto-theory, Paula uses art as a medium to digest life and unpack relational patterns. Her experiences are dissected, inspected and reassembled in the ultimate attempt to demystify them and dismantle internalised narratives around womanhood and fairy tale romance. 

Parole lives and works in London. She holds a BA in Visual Communication from the Academy of Fine Art Maastricht, where she specialised in film. After releasing two award-winning short films, she shifted her focus to fine art, while working as an art mediator for the Boros Collection, Berlin. She earned a graduate diploma and a Master of Fine Art, from Chelsea College of Art and Central Saint Martins, the latter supported by the Mona Hatoum Foundation Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and China, including institutions like TATE Collective, Safehouse Gallery, Hypha Studios, Liliya Gallery and Bonian Space, Beijing. She has been a finalist for the Prisma Art Prize, shortlisted for New Contemporaries 2024, and featured in publications such as ArtUltra, ArtPlugged, and the Financial Times. Paula currently works out of her studio at the Bombfactory Art Foundation, London. She is also the co-founder of the Filthy Fox Auction Club, supporting emerging artists from London’s art schools by auctioning their work.

Melania Toma, 1996, Padova, Italy 

Melania Toma’s practice collides dualities and dissipates the opposites-based structure of Western tradition articulating a visual world of interconnectedness where human and other-than-human animacies are one. Delving into the organic, the mythic and atavistic, her paintings pulsate with hermaphroditic fertility. Organs, bones, flowers, bacteria, and fishes move to the rhythm of a synchronous dance. Through her painterly gestures, Toma taps into the possibilities of the transformative power offered by shapes and motifs that are constantly in transition, oscillating between birth, growth and decomposition. 

Toma works and lives in London. She holds an MFA from Chelsea College, UAL, London. Her work exhibited internationally includes recent solo and group shows like ‘Five Hearts’, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2024); ‘Re-Rooted: The Quiet Politics of Plants’, Cooke Latham Gallery, London (2024); Loose Ends, Side-Thames Studios London (2024); ‘Embodied selfhood’, Pictorum gallery, London (2024); In Rapture, the Bombfactory Art Foundation, London (2024); Studio Responses IV, Saatchi Gallery London (2023). Melania Toma was artist in residence at Thread Residency, The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation, Senegal (2024), GIRLPOWER Residency, France (2024); Casa Wabi, Bosco Sodi Foundation, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico (2023). 

Giuditta Vettese, 1994 , Milan, Italy 

Encompassing sculpture, painting and performance, at the core of Giuditta Vettese’s practice is the encounter of erotism, matter and psychic energy. Coming from humanistic education in psychoanalysis, aesthetic and oriental philosophy, anthropology of the body and the sacred – Vettese considers corporeality as an essential medium, central to the spiritual experience; and erotism, a mystic and alchemic transformative power. Her creative methodology is informed by intermediality and instinct: images and forms manifest through lucid visions, lowered states of consciousness, and ecstatic experiences like orgasms. 

Vettese lives and works in Milan. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Università Statale di Milano / Parigi Sorbonne and a research-based Master's degree in Philosophy and Anthropology from EHESS, Paris. Recent solo and group shows include The Broken Arm, Paris, France (2024), ‘Auratica’, Spazio Volta, Bergamo, Italy (2023), Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Milan, Italy (2023), ReaFair, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy (2023). Giuditta is co-founder of Provinciale11 an interdisciplinary collective that curates exhibitions and residencies focused on nature, the earth and its inhabitants. She was artist in residence at Via Farini, Milan, Italy and Dolomiti Contemporanee, Casso, Italy.

Paula Zvane, 1998, Riga, Latvia 

Zvane’s artistic discourse seems fostered by a ritualistic impulse which, echoing the primordial and the mystic, delves into life’s potential for transmutation and renewal. She dialogues with the ribs of the earth, life remains and detritus such as animal skeletons, shells, fungus and leaves, witnessing her relationship with the natural environment. Unfolding where mourning merges with celebration, in Paula’s visceral poetics, plants are braided as hair, skin is grown out of bacteria, latex becomes shelter or trap, and fur scraps morph into uncanny creatures. Playing with the codes of monstrosity she tries to make sense of the unknown, ultimately addressing a primitive conflict intrinsic to nature and humans alike. 

Paula Zvane lives and works in London. She holds a BA in painting from the Art Academy of Latvia, a program which she completed travelling to Iceland University of the Arts in the third year to further develop her artistic skills and knowledge about myths and materials. Later she obtained an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London with support from the Cecil Lewis Sculpture Scholarship Award. Zvane participated in multiple international group shows and residencies, including the Skaftfell (Seyðisfjörður) Art residency, and ‘Dear figure, whom did you hang out with last night?’ at Mark Rothko Museum (2024). She's been nominated for Purvitis prize for her first solo show ‘INVISIBLE’ The Dream Room, Look Gallery, Riga, Latvia (2024). 

Maddalena Iodice, 1992, Ravenna, Italy 

Maddalena Iodice is an independent writer and curator whose research understands the body as a site of knowledge, threshold to the sensuous, the uncanny and the erotic. It is proceeding from this position that her work unfolds and explores contemporary artistic practices. Whether it translates in an editorial format or an exhibition space, her practice relies on somatic movement, open-ended dialogue and automatic writing as prime methodologies for exploration and reflection on the self, the other, and the invisible power structures we negotiate our existence with. 

Iodice lives and works between London and Milan, she holds an MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins in London and is co-founder of the interdisciplinary collective Provinciale11 that curates exhibitions and residencies focused on nature, the earth and its inhabitants. Published by various international publications, her recent writings feature interviews and essays with the likes of, Liliane Lijn, Jenna Gribbon, Amanda Wall, Josh Smith, Alvaro Barrington, Niamh O’Malley and Marina Abramovic.