A Physical Thing is a series of artistic interventions taking place at Studio Naim — a fitness studio and gym in Tel Aviv that offers over 300 classes per week for eg. Yoga, Dance, Meditation and Pilates.
Over the course of three days, new and existing works by twelve international and three local artists, including Jackson Bateman (UK), Lloyd Corporation (UK), Tahel Frosh (ISR), Katie Hare (UK), Lynne Kouassi (CH), Yochai Matos (ISR), Miriam Naeh (ISR), Michal Plata (GER), Arron Sands (UK), Anthony Schrag (SCO), Mariana Echeverri & Madeleine Stack (UK), Lior Tamim (ISR), Ruth Waters (UK) and Addam Yekutieli (ISR), will infiltrate the Studio’s infrastructure as the regular schedule continues in and around the artworks, highlighting the underlying mechanisms at play in the world of wellbeing, self-care and fitness.
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here is a video summarizing the event
How good a person are you?
In The Wellness Syndrome (2015) Carl Cederström and André Spicer borrow Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič’s term ‘biomorality’ to give name to the increasingly pervasive idea that good people are healthy and bad people are unhealthy. A Physical Thing expands on this proposal, intervening directly with the industry responsible for driving the commoditization of self-love through ideologically ambiguous marketing rhetoric, e.g., ‘happiness is a choice’. In doing so it encourages participants to look at the political, economic and social structures that pressure us as individuals to feel, and be seen to be feeling, happy and healthy.
The studio and gym is further the place where the tensions between self-care, self-discipline/control, sexual and identity-politics, class systems & social hierarchy are manifest. The Lebensreform movement of Germany and Switzerland beginning around 1850 heavily influenced the Hippie movement, which eventually incorporated Yoga, Awareness and Health as a means of resisting the forces of capital. Capitalism quickly subsumed these Eastern practices into a Western culture where the gym and the studio can be seen as the place where the perfect body-machine is built, and bought.
A Physical Thing does not seek to attack practices striving for a healthy mind/body dualism, but rather question the forces at play in an attempt to illuminate the dark corners of the wellness church.
A Physical Thing is curated by Tanja Rochow.
Kindly supported by:
Studio Naim, Tel Aviv
Postel Guest House, Jaffa
MFA Curating, Goldsmiths, London
