BERLIN.- New media technologies not only expand the ways in which we perceive reality; they also bring something uncanny within it to the surface. As both subject and object of these new realities, the human body has become a central concern of post-digital art. Around a century ago, it was photography—the “objective medium”—that Surrealist artists such as Man Ray and Jacques-André Boiffard used to fragment the living body into strange, object-like parts. The female torso, in its digital, biomorphic abstraction, is also the central motif of Salomé Chatriot’s Void is Seductive.
In the sculpture Void is Seductive No. 2, the torso appears mounted on the wall like a trophy: larger than life and clad in black leather, defensive and powerful—somewhere between a BDSM bodysuit, a futuristic sculpture and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Just as the wind billowed through Nike’s drapery like a sail, the streamlined contours of this object seem to yield to invisible external forces. The works in the exhibition originate from volumetric bodies designed by Chatriot on the computer. One particular feature of 3D software is that the physical conditions of the virtual space in which an object exists must always be created alongside the object itself. To manipulate CGI objects, the artist has previously used data from her own breathing, recorded with a spirometer.¹ Sometimes the key to understanding a thing lies in the forces that have left their imprint upon it.
The leather object, in turn, is a direct, almost “frozen” incarnation of a figure from the video First Month of Anger. Bringing it into being required a kind of séance. The entity that speaks to us first appears as a pulsating membrane. In Spiritualist séances around 1900, sticky white ectoplasm was believed to be the physical substance in which the souls of the dead became caught and took form. First Month of Anger, by comparison, might be understood as a manifestation within the ectoplasm of 3D modelling. Fluidly shape-shifting—torso, crystal, machine or organ—and shifting between opacity and transparency, the entity presents embodiment as an experience of boundaries. Oscillating, ocean-like, between “I” and “we”, it seems to dream an orgasmic dream of tactile contact and exuberant dissolution. As the artist explains, the being is a body formed according to the principle of a Möbius strip, collapsing the distinction between inside and outside. Human skin, too, creates inner and outer spaces that flow into one another. Considered from the perspective of the skin, the body is a volume folded in upon itself, a complex membrane in which the world resonates.²
In the medium of painting, Chatriot’s torsos appear with a metallic, pearlescent sheen. The images recall the multiple perspectives of modern painting, but perhaps even more strongly the cross-sectional and 3D ultrasound images produced by digital medical imaging. A flawless body, perfect and moist as if still coated in amniotic fluid, opens like an empty seashell—or like the calyx of a carnivorous plant. “Come in! / Come inside / my countless iterations,” the voice in the video beckons.
Modernity has repeatedly created monsters to reassure itself of its humanity at moments of technological upheaval. Frankenstein, Godzilla and their ilk were abject externalisations of an otherness newly made perceptible through technology. Salomé Chatriot enters into ecstatic contact with this technologically expanded realm of experience. Like a seashell, the hollow body she creates becomes a resonating chamber in which what is our own echoes back to us as something strange.
Dr. Katharina Weinstock
¹ A spirometer is a medical diagnostic device used to measure lung function, including the volume of air the lungs can inhale and exhale, as well as airflow rates.
² This idea was developed by Gilles Deleuze as a universal principle and a theory of perception in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
The exhibition is on view at OFFICE IMPART through October, 30, 2026.
