We carry our skin our whole lives, and it carries our matter. Skin is the organ closest to us. It forces us to confront it. Its entireness and impression encapsulate the body wholly. Perhaps, the excess of it makes the looker conclude us before getting to know us. I question, if our hearts, guts, and brains dangled on the exterior, how would the looker perceive us? Would this threaten the entirety of skin? Through image-making or even making, my peers in various ways are creating an excess of language and processes that can outdo the totality of skin and transform it to encapsulate more than just one body. Thinking of skin as community, skin as absence, skin as history, skin as ground, entangles us to something more than ourselves and each other.
In almost an instant, at any point in one’s life, skin can burst open due to internal, external, spiritual, or alien forces. Then, how do we evolve past such destruction?
Since the universe claims to have begun from a bang, I would not neglect the possibility of creation in the obliteration of skin. In fact, I believe that at this moment, an artist becomes the host of this fiery hell, until they/she/he/it releases it in a form.
Formulating a language is often the beginning of this practice. An endless saunter with a friend, gatherings with strangers, conducting intimate experiments, indulging in care, or even talking every day to your mother can birth this language. Now, there might be an urge: To repair the holes of the skin or tear them further and look into a pit that is often opened just to mend. This is when we are drawn to material. We witness the rise of an exploratory frenzy, a voyage to seek materials— either to overtake, collaborate, or manipulate. Material is language. It is also skin. It is living. It can embrace the art onto its skin, or it can reject it. Some might find comfort in experimenting with materiality, allowing heaps of unravelled skin to accumulate, leaving it to decay; others might stretch it to reveal its vastness. All acts are vital to the progress of regeneration.
Once our affairs are in order, we can await death. However, if we don’t achieve an equilibrium, we can carry on and live forever through the skin(s) that tie our temporalities and the language that can be carried on, dismantled, and rebuilt over and over again.
Text by Kanishka Kanishka published in the Exhibition Catalog