The body positivity movement will tell you that to find happiness you just have to accept your earthly vessel, foibles and folds and all. It’s as simple as that: think differently and everything will be better. It’s a bit like telling a sick person to cheer up. And the artists in GCCA’s new show expose the lie at the heart of that sentiment, because they know what we all know: bodies are gross.
For the 13 female and non-binary artists here, our bodies are tricky things to contend with, they’re objects to be wrestled with and reshaped, fleshy blobs that affect how we see ourselves, and how the world sees us.
Giulia Cenci suspends faces and bones in filthy reclaimed shower cubicles. Skin is left hanging on a rail, spines have atrophied next to limescaled screens. It’s oppressive, tense, like a mausoleum of people who died while crying in the shower. It’s the body as a crumbling, failing entity.
Shadi Al-Atallah paints figures writhing in brutal torment and agony, or maybe ecstasy, all caught mid-surgery or mid-orgasm. There is pain here so profound it’s tearing the figures apart. More crumbling, more failing.
But rebuilding happens as well, with Paloma Proudfoot’s ceramic mannequins sewing their broken bodies together in ritualised acts of dominance.
And bodies can produce too. Motherhood appears in the works by Miriam Cahn and Camille Henrot, but there’s no cooing maternal sweetness here. Cahn brilliantly paints spectral nude women with faceless children, they’re symbols of war, vulnerable victims forced to flee atrocities but forever shouldering their trauma. The child itself is the threat in Henrot’s paintings, a viral infestation in washed out sonogram-like canvases, changing the mother’s body until it forms into a twisted, scarred metallic form in her brilliant bronze torso.
There’s other good stuff here. Frida Orupabo collages together Black bodies from pop culture and ethnographic sources, Ebecho Muslimova hilariously and bawdily uses cartoon imagery to twist her alter-ego Fatebeh into surreal physical punchlines. Only the slightly meandering Metamorph film in the basement falls flat.
But I'm a little wary of this discourse-drenched attempt to view ‘the body’ as some wholly separate entity from the human figure. Is ‘the body’ a genuinely different thing to the human figure as a subject, which has been a central part of art history since the days of cave painting? What’s actually being achieved by separating physicality from personality and character?
But semantics aside, there’s still plenty of great art on display, filled with good ideas. Because these artists paint the body not as something to be accepted and celebrated, but to be contended with and reconsidered and appropriated and owned and rejected. It’s a show that says every body is beach-body-ready, as long as the beach is weird enough.
