Barely Furtive Pleasures at Nir Altman

Artists: Srijon Chowdhury, Inga Danysz, Eva Gold, Marie Matusz, Marina Sula

Exhibition title: Barely Furtive Pleasures

Curated by: Olivia Aherne

Venue: Nir Altman, Munich, Germany

Date: February 14 – March 21, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Nir Altman Galerie, Munich. All Srijon Chowdhury’s images are courtesy of the artist and Antonie Levi, Paris

Barely Furtive Pleasures can be experienced as a ‘psychological theatre’, a play in which each act shifts from submission to control, invisible to (hyper)visible and from desire to disgust – continuously affecting: explicitly and subconsciously.

Inhabiting conflicting positions at once, each of the works toy with the implicit and the explicit, the subject and the object. Carrying with them beauty, horror, disagreement and dissolution, they illuminate fluid demarcations, unstable territories and the unconscious. It is here in the spaces of repression, where power, control and agency are flipped, spun and recast, it is here that the psyche is split open, revealed.

While the works are presented static in the space, they each provoke a specific choreography, a gesture, a liaison – a scene possibly yet to unfold. Ambivalent in its own chronology, the exhibition exists in a moment far gone and yet still to take place, asking questions around the relapse of time and history, and our memory of how things came to be. The works’ shifting positions, often covert whilst in plain sight, reveal the transitory nature of power, control and agency: who is looking, who is in control, what is at stake? Both unsettling and alluring, they stage a psychological and emotional break up – psychosis as a form of catharsis.

The exhibition explores both presence and negation, with works that are suggestive of a body but refuse its spectacle – unconsumed, ghostly and lingering. It is in this haunting space, of push and pull, of duality and multiplicity, where the disentanglement and dissolution of the self might begin.

Barely Furtive Pleasures, 2020, exhibition view, curated by Olivia Aherne, Nir Altman, Munich

Eva Gold, A changed man (the perv), 2019, Vulcanised rubber, gaffer tape, steel, bolts, Dimensions variable

Eva Gold, C.T, 2019, Hand carved imperial leather soap, 5 x 8 x 2 cm; Eva Gold, N.H, 2019, Hand carved imperial leather soap, 5 x 8 x 2 cm

Eva Gold, C.T, 2019, Hand carved imperial leather soap, 5 x 8 x 2 cm

Eva Gold, N.H, 2019, Hand carved imperial leather soap, 5 x 8 x 2 cm

Eva Gold, C.T, 2019, Hand carved imperial leather soap, 5 x 8 x 2 cm; Eva Gold, N.H, 2019, Hand carved imperial leather soap, 5 x 8 x 2 cm

Inga Danysz, Impostures, 2018, Glass installation, Dimensions variable

Marie Matusz, The world wants to be deceived therefore deceive it, 2019, Aluminum, neoprene, cardboard, fabric on a plexiglas pedestal, 96 x 64 x 6 cm