The exhibition Gut explores the poetics of underground existence – engaging with some of the most powerful symbols of human origins and human destiny ever forged by the imagination. It is dedicated to the dialogue between the visual and other arts with literature and its theory. The exhibition is accompanied by a parallel program that develops and reflects upon the main thematic axes of the exhibition, extending them into new fields. At its core, four “archetypal” literary themes with a shared atmosphere are placed in juxtaposition: the cave, the underbelly, the underground, and the tunnel. These are sites and forms of depth and isolation, scenes where chthonic forces rupture inner enclosures and shape a unified poetics of descent, dwelling, and emergence – but also of the reversibility between above and below. The aim is to illuminate the similarities and differences among these four motifs and, above all, to investigate the narrative and semantic variations that emerge when they are activated within different historical and sociopolitical contexts – thus reveal ing certain deconstructive, critical theoretical, and sociological readings of them. In this way, the exhibition seeks to move beyond the stereotype of the claustrophobic psychological portrait that often envelops the solitary hero of existential allegories; it at tempts to trace the points of intersection between the grotesque and the absurd, and to view the “undergrounding” of smaller or larger social groups –along lines of class, race, and gender– as both an indicator of a shifting anthropological condition and a matrix for visions of technological futurity. Through this comparative lens, the exhibition seeks to map the artistic and literary traces of the underground experience, while at the same time tracing its metamorphoses as an aesthetic and conceptual core of the contemporary imaginary.

The bodices are hyperreal and totally fake. You feel you can pick one up and fondle it, sniff it, try it on, but no, it’s a dress ghost and we’ll never meet. Collected not from bodices in the flesh, but bodice images in the digital, this left a pleasing constraint – the placement of prearranged wrinkles, topography and invisible sleeves were not her choices to make. They are splayed open to document the inside, purely for… you. So few eyes were ever laid on them – these backs of embroideries that people call the dark sides, so…consider yourself lucky?

 — Kate Sekules