![]() You can also attach accessories, such as resistance bands and gymnastics rings, for even greater versatility. Perfect for home gyms, power towers allow you to perform several weighted and equipment-free exercises, including pullups, triceps dips, and hanging leg raises. Best for small spaces: Stamina 1690 Power TowerĪ power tower is an all-in-one piece of exercise equipment that typically combines a horizontal bar, parallel bars, and multiple handles to allow for a full-body strength workout.Best design: Steelbody STB-98501 Power Tower.Best versatile: Harison Multifunction Power Tower.Best with a bench: Titan Fitness Power Tower with Bench.Best value: Body Flex Sports Body Champ VKR1987 Power Tower.Perhaps that lack is precisely their point, but they failed to evoke for me the experience of actually living in a body. The gaping vaginas of Ebecho Muslimova’s works, the grotesque breasts of Miriam Cahn’s, the violent fights-cum-orgasms of Shadi Al-Atallah’s – none of these images felt connected to any sense of self, individuality or soul. ![]() But what I couldn’t stop questioning was the isolation of a “body” from a person. All the artists represented here are fascinated by bodies: how they look, the things that grow inside them or drip out of them, the way they function when they are broken into parts and pieces and how other people see them. What is a body without the self inside it? How can the two be divided? And what is the point of trying to? Not all the artists here answer this question or even seem interested in engaging in it, but the works of those who don’t feel empty. Walking through the exhibition, I was struck by the strange emptiness of bodies that have been reduced to just that: bodies, and nothing else. It invites the viewer into the story and into the strange physicality of metamorphosis. The film oscillates between Daphne’s perspective, in which vision is obscured and changing, and Apollo’s, watching Daphne transform. It reimagines the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne through a modern, queer lens, focusing on the moment in which Daphne transforms into a tree to escape the pursuit of Apollo. In the final room of the exhibition, the film Metamorph, a collaborative work by Clémentine Bedos, Holly Hunter, Verity Coward and Assia Ghendir, made me think about my body in the space of the film, too. Though they sit on mannequins, I immediately wanted to be inside them and see my body as part of their materiality. Anna Perach’s wonderfully tactile wearable sculptures are made of vibrant, fuzzy textiles. The most engaging works in the exhibition prompt the viewer to think about their own body in relation to the work. Photograph: Courtesy of Giulia Cenci and SpazioA. The most dramatic work in the show … an installation from the dry salvages series by Giulia Cenci, 2023. Like most of the works here, it reminded me that my experience of living in a body among other bodies is only mine – it is not universal. These pieces of bodies are spooky, but they are also so far removed from living bodies that I found it hard to be horrified by them. It feels like the set of a horror movie, right down to the gallery space itself – the tank that once supplied the Victorian bathhouse which houses the CCA. Dried vines or clumps of roots descend from some of them, and one is being devoured by the figure of a wolf. It is a series of body parts cast from aluminium which have been hung from hooks in old shower stalls. The most dramatic work in the show is Giulia Cenci’s series, dry salvages, which fills an entire room. The building almost feels like a dissected, disembowelled body itself. The CCA is a remarkably fitting space for this exhibition, given its skeletal, stripped back character. ![]() Many of these works seem to want to discard or fundamentally alter the body, rather than embrace its weirdness. Bodies are not presented as empowering or reclaimable, but instead as abject, disgusting or objectified. They examine the ways in which bodies are the site of patriarchy, misogyny, racism and ableism. Working from the assumption that the “unruly” body is implicitly female, Black, disabled, queer or other, the exhibition is made up of work by 13 female and non-binary artists. ![]() Unruly Bodies at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) reminds us just how grotesque they can be. Bodies are porous, weird and gross, much as we might try to forget it.
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