Curator: Danni O’Brien. The body has always been contested territory. Legislated, pathologized, fetishized, disciplined — the body and its desires have rarely been left in peace, let alone in the control of the people who inhabit them. Body Sovereignty is an exhibition about who owns our body, its expression and its sexuality. ARC Gallery invites artists working across all media to submit work that claims for itself a radical ownership over sexuality, desire, and bodily identity. We are interested in art that refuses to be tamed — work that finds the erotic in the accidental, the absurd, the domestic, and the discarded. Work that borrows the visual language of instruction and mechanism only to subvert it. Work that is bold in its irreverence, polymorphic in its affect, and unafraid to blur lines between innocence and perversion, function and fantasy, the handmade and the found. We are drawn to art that treats the body not as subject matter but as site of survival — art assembled from cultural cast-offs, scavenged and repurposed into something fantastical and alive. Art that is cheeky and meditative in equal measure. That takes months to resolve what was gathered intuitively. That arrives slowly at something unsettling and true. Body Sovereignty is not about shock. It is about depth of feeling — about understanding, as Audre Lorde wrote, that the erotic is a measure of our most expansive sense of self.
