curated by_Walter Seidl

Physicality in Sports and at Work

The issue of physicality has been of central concern in many artworks since the popularization of gender relations and the advent of a heightened sense for visual body configurations in public space. Despite a ubiquitous focus on various gender constellations, the functionality of the body in relation to physical activities has also been examined by artists and media theorists due to the onslaught of advertising which propagates and lives up to the notion of the “perfect body.”

The works in this exhibition play with the Freudian principle of pleasure and reality, showing bodily activities in the context of sports and professional physical training, where pure pleasure can be reached only to a limited extent. That which usually seems pleasurable to look at actually entails extreme physical hardship and a constant fear of failure. The exhibition consists of video works in which bodies are forced to extremes in order to live up to the roles they have to fulfill in various social settings.