THE (PSYCHO)SOMATIC ZONE is born from the pure and immediate collision of body and mind. In this reflexive zone, sensation comes before language and the intellect loses its role as mediator. “Abandon all hope, you who enter,” warned Dante at the gates of Hell. Here, it is artifice that must be relinquished.
At first glance seemingly opposed, Mire Lee’s solo exhibition and the collection focus devoted to Pipilotti Rist occupy the two poles of a single inner space. On the left, the body exposed to its cycles, tensions, and states of exhaustion; on the right, the mind surrendered to affective, psychedelic, and emotional overflow. Or perhaps it is the reverse? From one space to the other, sensation drifts and thought becomes embodied. The works offer neither key nor comfort: emotion surfaces raw and immediate, without hierarchy between pleasure and pain, externalization and introspection.
For us, abandoning all artifice does not merely require crossing the exhibition thresholds. It means leaving behind protective layers and habits of rationalization in order to be inhabited by sensation. Fear, melancholy, desire, euphoria, excitement, and disgust sometimes arise simultaneously, awakening the stories each of us already carries in our flesh. What is presented here without modesty reverberates in a mirror effect: the works imprint themselves on body and mind, transforming contemplation into a direct and instinctive experience.
On the left side of the exhibition space, Mire Lee’s sculptures — body-machines, sometimes alive, sometimes drained of life — await visitors patiently, trapped in an infernal routine. In their inertia lies the rest after ecstasy; in their exuberance, pleasure, tension, and agony. On their surfaces, like scars, marks and residues preserve the memory of their lived experience. What has been remains, hovering on the edge of erasure.
Construction materials — props, turbines, panels, nets — transform into skins and skeletons. Once protective and powerful, these architectural relics become breathless, vulnerable creatures, straddling the line between machine and flesh. The aesthetic of science fiction emerges naturally: these cyborg bodies, suspended between past and future, are nothing other than exiled entities from forgotten limbo.
The space imposes contradictory emotions: fascination and anxiety, desire and repulsion, wonder and discomfort. Each form strikes the body first, leaving a lasting impression. Here, matter lives, breathes, and remembers — and in contact with it, we are inexorably reminded of our own mortality.
