Body Mould curated by Maddalena Iodice
Kesewa Aboah, Isabella Benshimol Toro, Inès Michelotto, Paula Parole, Melania Toma, Giuditta Vettese, Paula Zvane
Guts Gallery, London
From November 29th until December 21st, 2024
Ascending to the second floor of 10 Andre Street in East London, you step into Guts Gallery, a white-cube space with an industrial edge. To the right, beyond the main pristine gallery space, lies a more intimate room housing Body Mould. The exhibition, curated by Italian writer and curator Maddalena Iodice, confronts taboos, offering a raw and unflinching look at the body and its moulds.
“I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs”, reads the exhibition text, quoting French feminist critic Hélène Cixous. These words serve as a manifesto for the show: a deeply personal and female-driven exploration of embodiment that is intimate, universal, audacious, and tender. Body Mould brings together seven international artists — Kesewa Aboah, Isabella Benshimol Toro, Inès Michelotto, Paula Parole, Melania Toma, Giuditta Vettese, and Paula Zvane, all born between 1992 and 1998 — all pushing against societal expectations of what a body should be: theirs, ours, yours, and mine.
“Uncover. My body tells me to uncover. The world doesn’t want to see me, wants to eradicate me, wants to silence me. But I’ll try my best to be as loud, as beautiful and as happy as possible, everyone needs to see my body!”
“The need to not make sense but just be.”
The bodies in this show conceal and reveal, entangle and fracture, always with distinct voices. Venezuelan-born, London-based Isabella Benshimol Toro evokes a ghostly presence through intimate domestic gestures. A white undergarment, seemingly abandoned mid-motion on a black leather couch, is encased in resin — everyday traces fossilised into artefacts suspended between the familiar and the uncanny. While Benshimol Toro suggests absence, Kesewa Aboah confronts us with unapologetic presence. Her work, Loins (2024), captures the weight and impact of a body pressing onto paper, heavy shadows that feel almost mirror-like. The title underscores the work’s raw physicality, drawing attention to the visceral and sexual nature of flesh itself.
Aboah’s soft eroticism turns cheeky and awkward in Paula Parole’s Unhook Me (2024). With fishnet tights framing a scene and parting to reveal a back adorned with a mole and a row of bra hooks, the work narrates a clumsy, almost comedic seduction. It’s an ode to the uncomfortable phases of bodily transformation — watching your breasts grow, hoping they’d take the shape of magazine models, only to feel perpetually misaligned. Parole stages an unvarnished, almost theatrical reckoning with the body’s clunky transitions: changing, rejecting, growing, yet never quite fitting. These transformations also take centre stage in Italian artist Inès Michelotto’s self-portrait. Her body confronts the viewer, defiant and unashamed. It’s flesh among flesh — grown, transformed, regenerated, and ultimately accepted. Michelotto’s body is more than a vessel; it’s a mirror of inner resilience, a container of courage, and a repository of freedom.
“My body whispers the truth of transformation – the messiness, confusion, and vulnerability of change. It carries the marks of this transformation — the scars, the traces, and the struggles — but it also holds resilience, tenderness, and strength, which the world often overlooks.”
“Freedom. I want to feel it in my studio and in my work, and I want everyone who enters into my studio and participates in my practice to feel it too.”
“I believe that what the body whispers is its being the primordial medium of subjectivity. It is a conduit for passion, intuition, and feeling — things the world often seeks to silence in favor of logic and order. The body is a portal that invites us to experience the world not through rationality but through direct, embodied experience.”
Primordial and spiritual undercurrents flow through the works of Italian artists Melania Toma and Giuditta Vettese, each using the body as a conduit to the earth. Toma’s vibrant, fluid forms weave narratives of subjectivity, gliding effortlessly through the intersections of gender, ecological decay, and the quiet complexities of domestic life. Her trans-morphic works, unanchored by geography or culture, embody the transformative potential of care and healing, challenging colonial legacies and power structures. In contrast, Vettese’s abstraction is visceral and tactile: red-hued watercolours resemble anatomical portraits, nostalgic depictions of our inner landscapes. At the centre of the room, her bronze sculpture forms what curator Maddalena Iodice describes as a “pagan altar”, a space for channelling and manifesting the energies that shape and guide our physical forms.
Bridging the primordial and the futuristic, Latvian artist Paula Zvane turns her attention to hair. Her Hair Lace (2024) transforms organic fibres into hardened embroidery, creating an intricate, fibrous map of identity – an extension of the body.
Body Mould challenges and reshapes what it means to inhabit a body. Through these seven artists, the exhibition spills over boundaries, dismantles conventions, and dares to ask: what does your body whisper that the world insists on silencing?
Melania Toma, Small Decomposer, 2024.
“My body whispers a call to transcend the human and embrace the primal, to connect with what lies beyond human borders. It speaks of a deep, animalistic yearning to belong to something larger — an urge to merge with the natural world, to experience and embrace the unknown, the untamed.”
“My body speaks through its surfaces – the textures, the sensations that are felt rather than articulated. The world may overlook these subtle forms of expression, but my body insists on being understood through touch, through what is tactile and immediate. It’s about connecting on a deeper, sensory level.”
