Pacify your lust before the all-seeing eye feels your heartbeat rising – Laura Gozlan

Pacify your lust before the all-seeing eye feels your heartbeat rising
Laura Gozlan

Curated by Ema Hesterová & Denis Kozerawski

16.07 – 11.08  & 1 – 15.09 2021

A Promise of Kneropy, Pečnianska 7, Bratislava

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You can feel the pressing heat spilling inside of your body
It’s feeding your nerve endings
It rhythmizes them, tickles them
Hurry up, quick, before they see you
Hold up a little, release and …

Franco “Bifo” Berardi says, that capitalism is “based on an endless postponement of pleasure, and
simultaneously on the permanent excitement of desire”1. In this context, we can view the boiling
ways of self-gratification and absorbing moments of climaxing as subtle, mass-practiced instants of
resistance, which, however, do not deny the logic described by Bifo. On the contrary, they adopted
it, ride with it and use it in their own revolutionary benefit. Extension and postponement of the
moment of climax makes it more intense and all the more excites us and our desires to reach it again,
but despite the mentioned logic of capitalism is pleasure – more or less articulated, more or less
directly and more or less involving our bodies – close at hand almost anytime.

Laura Gozlan’s installation composes a space of performative experience of climax. She positions
the moments of theatrically articulated lust and satisfaction into a contrasting and intimate
environment disrupted by dark moments which disarray the social standards, and which refer to prosthetic
aesthetics or senescence. In her videos moist by various bodily liquids (Dead Fingers Talk, I, II and
III, 2021) we see an older woman situated in a composed setting of a theatre scene, loudly and
shamelessly pleasing herself while confronting us with her penetrative, patriarchy unnerving looks.
Together with objects derived from the shape of clitoris and torso castings, referring to self-restricting
and – metaphorically speaking – the effort to pour bodies into stiff, impermeable forms, the artist points
out to conceptions that were introduced to us as “innapropriate”, as “tabu”. She confronts our internalized
discomfort from unfiltered gratification, sexuality of the elderly or prosthetic bodies… Orgasm thus
becomes a mobilizing element, an accelerator. The beginning, the process, the end.

Text by Ema Hesterová

The gallery program is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.

1 Franco „Bifo“ Berardi: Desire, Pleasure, Senility, and Evolution. In: e-flux Journal #106 – February 2020
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/106/312516/desire-pleasure-senility-and-evolution/ (15. 7. 2020).