Dawn on Your Skin. Duo show.

The exhibition ‘Dawn on your skin’ features artists Katya Tsareva and Damaris Athene. It is an invitation to reflect and research the ideas which seem to exercise the greatest powers of seduction, but are basically self-contradictory. One such idea is beauty as a synonym for youthfulness, another is aging. Beauty overrides so many familiar opposites: the natural and the historical, the pristine and the artificial, the individualising and the conformist, the physical and digital – even the beautiful and the ugly.

All standards of beauty, even when they seem particularly perverse or tenacious, are inherently fragile. Regardless of how much the outlines change and what new shapes and bends appear - the body remains the body. Questions arise: What is corporeality? What can we consider an object of sexuality? Where does disgust begin and why do we perceive the same image differently?

The new series ‘Tender’ by Katya Tsareva revolves around beauty as a myth. Nowadays, this myth seems, once more, coed. Standards of beauty are being applied to men as well as women. Katya depicts models from found images or self-taken photographs and transforms them through modification and refinement. Adopting an academic painterly approach, she meticulously transfers the altered images onto canvas in a realistic manner, thus dissecting to understand the body as a sexual object, as something both frightening and exciting at the same time, attractive and repulsive. Modifications of the idea of beauty succeed each other in an accelerating rhythm, that it’s fair to predict that no ideal body will last for a person’s lifetime.

Another essential idea and paradox is aging. Aging is a movable doom. It is a crisis that never exhausts itself, because the anxiety is never really used up. Being a crisis of the imagination rather than of ‘real life’, it has the habit of repeating itself again and again. The territory of aging has no fixed boundaries. Up to a point it can be defined as one wants.

Damaris Athene explores the Posthuman and how lived experience mediated through technology offers new ways of viewing the materiality and potential or the physical limitations of the body. Posthuman theory offers an opportunity to reexamine hierarchies in a post-anthropocentric world, blurring the borders between humans and non-humans. Damaris researches the unseen worlds we contain within us, ones that are inaccessible without surgery or scans and that we rarely think of until we experience illness or injury. Her new sculptures from the ‘Fruiting_Bodies’ series explore the push and pull of attraction and repulsion, inhabiting a border space between two supposedly opposite conditions.

Body memorizes both beauty and aging. Artworks by Katya Tsareva and Athene Damaris transmute from paintings to sculptures and vice versa. Each work exists individually, but as a part of a synchronized group, co-existing with each other, moving as one. The exhibition explores these fluid interconnections of matter and life, the entanglement of humans, the environment and technology.