Online exhibition: Intimacies

To further celebrate and mark the launch of this year’s first issue Intimacies, Simulacrum has created an online exhibition that virtually brings together the works of eight incredible artists: Miss Toto Rodgers, Lukas Penney, Loïs de Vries, Geertje Brandenburg, Niels Gercama, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Maxim Litjens and Stijn Pommée. Starting tomorrow on Friday March 4th, the exhibition can be viewed through this link.

In addition to our published issue, this online exhibition further explores relational intimacy and vulnerability, which touch upon each other closely. Opening oneself up to connection – to be seen, touched, felt, permeated – is never without risk. But in an age when proximity can form an actual threat to one’s health, close contact has become something increasingly uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

Mass-isolation and physical distancing have left us both longing and avoidant of touch as we are turning to other languages in which to be intimate. With our interpersonal relationships oscillating between the tangible and digital, the cybersphere has offered one virtual language for intimacy that does not require proximity.

Our contributing artists touch upon the intimate and extimate, defiantly. From first glance these contributions seem to testify how yearning for the intimate is inevitably a highly individual experience.

However, whether it lies in the attempt to start commotion through “itchy imagery,” the delicacy of letter correspondence in war times, or in the form of creative fiction transgressing the realm of relational romance, each of the exhibited works compellingly explores the universally recognizable feeling of wanting to be seen, touched, felt, permeated by the (significant) Other.

And you, dear reader, please wander through this virtual realm while it lasts…

3 maart 2022