'Exposure' explores the performative power of the nude and the gestural by setting images of the body in motion. It examines the representational strategies of the naked body in art, film, fashion and digital culture, as well as the treatment of the performer's live body in action through its exposure. Reframing the ongoing performance of the body in today's culture of hypervisibility, the piece reveals media staging as a means of producing and distributing our desires. It also challenges us to experience the limits of the body and to reflect on the conditions of its vulnerability.

In 'Exposure', performer and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis performatively studies the dialectical relationships between nudity and clothing, tenderness and violence, intimacy and alienation in order to empower the dancers and the spectators via affective images and situations. The representation of nudity is primarily concerned with the extreme physicality and the staged ambiguity of corporeality. It includes studies of everyday gestures, the excessive body cult in dance, intimate encounters and acts of exhaustion. The piece exposes the social power relations that shape bodily discipline, gender representations and sexuality in real life and on stage. By allowing gestures and actions to endure, exposure as a performative strategy opens up the possibility of rethinking our habits and ways of sensing the body.

Artist talk

Following the performance on Friday, 6 November, there will be an audience discussion with Alexandra Bachzetsis, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, the heads of gta exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich - everyone in the audience is invited. The discussion will be held in German.