lip lines
Lips mark a boundary. As the soft edge between the body and the world, they are sites of intimacy and exposure, silence and speech, desire and control. It is through the lips that language is articulated, desire is enacted and identity is performed. Lip Lines considers lips as active agents within cultural, political and erotic systems, surfaces through which bodies are read, regulated and performed. Lips are coded with meaning: sexualised in advertising, disciplined through norms of beauty and weaponised in acts of silence and censorship. They operate as a critical threshold where language, desire and power converge.
Taking the lips as a site of both pleasure and pain, the exhibition positions them as a space of emotional and political intensity. What does it mean to speak through lips that is arbitrated by social and political codes? How can the lips operate as a site of resistance rather than compliance?
Lip Lines invites artists working across all media to engage with these themes. We are interested in practices that address the politics of voice, the construction of beauty and desire and the limits on expression, as well as those that push against containment through excess, distortion or refusal.