The Subjected Body
Galeria Azur, Berlin, Germany

The Subjected Body emerges from an investigation of the body’s relationship to structure, visibility, and constraint, specifically what occurs when the body is measured against a fixed form it cannot enter.

In this performance, I place my body in relation to a 40 × 50 cm canvas. I compare myself to its proportions, attempt to fit inside it, and eventually break it apart, positioning myself within what remains of the frame.

The work functions as a critique of the art world and its institutional mechanisms of access, legitimacy, and exclusion. It examines how artists are often evaluated not solely through the work they produce, but through the social, economic, racialized, gendered, and institutional conditions attached to their bodies and identities. The frame becomes a material metaphor for the systems artists are expected to conform to: class position, legibility, marketability, proximity to power, and the forms of approval required to be recognized as valuable.

Each attempt to fit becomes another form of pressure. Each movement reveals the limits already set by the structure.

When did art become about making money?
When did value become something decided by those who control the frame?

Echoing Michel Foucault, the work considers the body as both productive and subjected, shaped through discipline, visibility, and control. Under the pressure of being seen, the body begins to regulate itself.

The Subjected Body asks what happens when the artist is made to fit.
What is broken in the process.
What remains when the frame can no longer contain them.

Photography by Leen Shem.