staged bodies
group show
A photographic proposition by six outsider artists, centered on the body as a space of intimate, transgressive, and often obsessive staging. These “staged bodies” — transformed, fetishized, sutured — escape aesthetic and moral norms, instead shaped by desire, impulse, or the need to exist differently.
Tomasz Machciński (1942–2022) explores metamorphosis through more than 22,000 self-portraits, in which he becomes alternately a man, a woman, or a mythological figure.
Lubŏs Plný (b. 1961) uses his own body as a medium for radical acts — stitching, marking, and scarring, photographed as rituals of transformation.
Jorge Alberto Cadi (b. 1963) fragments, assembles, and sutures images to create hybrid, mystical, and ambiguous bodies.
Miroslav Tichý (1926–2011), for his part, secretly photographed women in public spaces, constructing a dreamlike and obsessive universe.
The Anonymous Fetishist (active between 1996 and 2006) left behind hundreds of amateur snapshots of legs in stockings, taken furtively in the street or from television — fragments of an obsessive gaze that remained hidden.
John Kayser (1922–2007), an office worker in Los Angeles, relentlessly photographed women trampling flowers, books, or fabrics — a ritualized fetishism, where the contact between bodies and materials both intensifies and questions desire.
All of them project onto the body — often the female body — a mental fiction. The exhibition highlights this point of tension between gaze, desire, repetition, and performance: here, photography does not document — it acts.
