Channeling: body ←Image→ viewer

About the Exhibition

Channeling: body ←Image→ viewer features works by eleven international artists who communicate through and with the body. The featured artists draw on diverse approaches and means to deliberately activate direct connections with the viewer. These articulations position the viewer to experience a heightened awareness of their self and body, and to explore how bodies channel and confront societal malaise, oppression, transition, and vulnerability. Varied gestures—crawling, lying, climbing, kneeling, pointing, running, walking backward—evoke memory, history, and rhetoric and call attention to the senses and physicality of skin, touch, voice, hearing, and sight.

Situating the body politic in history and as a counter to screen culture, the works in the exhibition remind us that we humans are both in, and of, the body. Channeling: body ←Image→ viewer includes photography, video, and installations that memorialize, witness, and bear tribute to our humanity. 

Curated by Joan Giroux (US) and Alice Maude-Roxby (UK), Channeling: body ←Image→ viewer includes works from the 1970s to the present by Laura Aguilar, Pia Arke, EJ Hill, Susan Hiller, Ketty La Rocca, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, Gustav Metzger, Paulo Nazareth, Anna Oppermann, Gina Pane, and Bridget Smith.   

MoCP is supported by Columbia College Chicago, MoCP Advisory Board, MoCP Museum Council, individuals, private and corporate foundations, and government grants.

The 2025-2026 exhibition season is sponsored in part by the Comer Family Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund, Henry Nias Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Pritzker Traubert Foundation, The Rowan Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Venable Foundation.

This project is partially supported by a Faculty Development Grant from Columbia College Chicago. MoCP acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.