The Second Body

13th Mar - 27th Apr 2024

Soho Revue

14 Greek St, W1D 4DP

Noah Schneiderman, Loren Erdrich, Hanne Peeraer, Sonia Jia, Johanna Seidel, Fiona Finnegan

“Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves?’

(The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard)

Daisy Hildyard opens her 2017 titular essay reflecting on the intellectual history of the link between humans and their natural surroundings. She refers to Christian scripture where God punishes the misdemeanour of men with plagues and floods, or Shakespeare in which natural phenomena (tempests, moving forests) are in effect of human acts. At the heart of her essay is the emphasis that humans can and do have a responsibility for things which may not bear us any tangible relation. Through various vignettes, Hildyard presents the fertile possibilities for our relationship with the natural world if we adopted a new kind of dualism, one which challenges the limitations of considering only what we can experience from our corporeal confines,. She presents the reader with a second, alternative body, a global presence which allows us to experience that which lies beyond what we can touch, smell, see or taste. Between these two beings, bodies and their surroundings bleed into one another as borders between entities break down and along with this, limited taxonomies.

Soho Revue is pleased to present ‘The Second Body,’ a group exhibition of paintings by Loren Erdrich, Hanne Peeraer, Sonia Jia, Noah Schneiderman, Johanna Seidel and Fiona Finnegan in which each artist adopts this slippery, flowing, unstable, coagulating mentality formally and metaphorically in their paintings. In this exhibition, the viewer is encouraged to imagine a world that expands beyond the constraints of time, scale and geography. For some of the artists, through their use of organic material their work formally mimics the landscapes and natural elements they describe. For the others, such as Johanna and Loren, these notions are explored through more lucid yet equally affecting images, in which facets of the human body morph with the landscape into new organic forms. At the core of this exhibition is the hope that we can have a more empathetic approach to the world around us, and consequently a fruitful, reciprocal relationship with the ecosystems in which we exist.