Bodies are porous, weird and gross, much as we might try to forget it. Unruly Bodies at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) reminds us just how grotesque they can be. Working from the assumption that the “unruly” body is implicitly female, Black, disabled, queer or other, the exhibition is made up of work by 13 female and non-binary artists. They examine the ways in which bodies are the site of patriarchy, misogyny, racism and ableism. Bodies are not presented as empowering or reclaimable, but instead as abject, disgusting or objectified. Many of these works seem to want to discard or fundamentally alter the body, rather than embrace its weirdness. The CCA is a remarkably fitting space for this exhibition, given its skeletal, stripped back character. The building almost feels like a dissected, disembowelled body itself.
The most dramatic work in the show is Giulia Cenci’s series, dry salvages, which fills an entire room. It is a series of body parts cast from aluminium which have been hung from hooks in old shower stalls. Dried vines or clumps of roots descend from some of them, and one is being devoured by the figure of a wolf. It feels like the set of a horror movie, right down to the gallery space itself – the tank that once supplied the Victorian bathhouse which houses the CCA. These pieces of bodies are spooky, but they are also so far removed from living bodies that I found it hard to be horrified by them. Like most of the works here, it reminded me that my experience of living in a body among other bodies is only mine – it is not universal.
