OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, 11th January 2024, 18:00-20:00

Seeking the interface between carnality and the sacred, Anat Homm’s practice explores the essence of the duality of the human condition, exploring the co-existence of beauty and repulsion, the erotic and destructive and the boundaries of the corporeal. Through her representation of the body Homm explores humanity’s instinct to possess and to comprehend through our most primitive obsession: our own being.

The dominant thematic element of Homm’s work lies in an interest in sacred transience and the sublime aspects of the carnal. Within this, Homm’s practice places a particular emphasis on the vulnerability of our continuance as symbolized by the fragility of our physical states. To be wounded demands exposure, to be unveiled, to be removed from a protectionist shroud. Thus, the macabre beauty of the punctuated flesh and exposed entrails is at once horrifying as it scratches at our need for self-preservation and thus reminds us of the fatality of existence and our inefficacy to defeat the inevitable. Synchronically, this transience makes it dangerous to feel, with the human condition containing a great potential for pain. In this sense, our base instinct of fear concerning our own lives can be extended to a vulnerability with regards to our other mortal attachments that exist in an equally precarious state of permanence.

Alongside the interest in the vulnerability of transience, Homm’s work explores the erotic undertones and tensions between our carnal and spiritual relationship with the flesh. Within this she explores the transgressive boundary between pleasure and pain, with an openness to eroticism as extraneous to morality. The co-existence of pleasure and pain in the objects of our desire creates a resulting turmoil that is what makes us so terrifyingly human:

“Only a fool would go to a fight to the death and fall in love with both combatants. But just imagine the intensity with which every second of the fight will burn into him. And at the moment of death and survival at the end, the fool will fall to the ground in pain and cry out in bliss. And then he will laugh, because he has no other choice in the face of this incongruity within himself. And he will become addicted to this laughter, because he has never felt more alive and more human than at this moment.”
– Anat Homm