Exhibited at UKS, Oslo in Moon in Your Mouth, joint exhibition with Thora Dolven Balke and Tarek Lachrissi, 26 May – 25 June, 2023.
The installation work A Matter of Constructing a Person (2023) consists of plaster castings on steel tables, a plaster casting with embossed text, and The Mechanics of Friendship (Proper Hug), an inkjet print on silk. It was shown in the Moon in Your Mouth exhibition at UKS in Oslo, Norway in May 2023 as part of the Rehearsing Hospitalities programme by Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
Moon in your Mouth looks at processes of desire and intimacy in relation to questions of access. If we think of intimacy as seeing and being seen, what is required for the seeing to take place: how does one access intimacy?
Control, and how it is wielded over certain bodies, is also the subject of Inari Sandell’s A Matter of Constructing a Person (2023). This series takes as its starting point an article published in the 1960s describing an approach to the behavioural treatment of children on the autistic spectrum, in which the child would be rewarded with a treat for giving a ‘proper’ hug, but given an electric shock for the ‘wrong kind’ of interaction. These kinds of ideas and their legacy weigh heavily still, bypassing as they do questions of consent and bodily autonomy, and gatekeeping who has access to comfort and intimacy on their own terms.
Curated by Max Hannus
Images by Vegard Kleven and Inari Sandell
