BARE LIFE

Bare Life is a performance that examines the body as a site of exposure, projection, and control. Inside a human-sized glass aquarium, my naked body, covered with living snails, transforms into both a living organism and an exhibited object for the viewer’s gaze. The work confronts the mechanisms through which bodies are observed, categorized, aestheticized, and consumed within contemporary systems of spectatorship. The transparent terrarium evokes associations with a museum exhibit, medical surveillance, captivity, and observation, yet the body inside it simultaneously expresses vulnerability, slowness, and intimacy. This living exhibit, created through coexistence between human and more-than-human bodies, reveals the impossibility of observing bare life without the overlay of socially conditioned conventions of perception.