Embodied Narratives is a bawdy (yet contemplative) streak through the Lower East Side gallery scene. Kates-Ferri Projects’ latest show serves its audience eleven contemporary artists with a crisp sapidity. The show features primarily 2D works of varied sorts, from oils, to panty hose—yes, you read that correctly—textiles, to a video piece that invades viewers’ perception and plays with the limits of “2D”. As well as some strong 3D works to mingle amongst.
Curated by Micaela Giovannotti, the tagline reads “eleven contemporary artists reimagine the body as archive and memory.”
“…What it means to render a figure in paint, clay, fabric, or light”
Perfectly in time for International Women’s Day the show includes female artists from Bosnia, Iran, Italy, South Africa, the UK, and the US.
Chatting with the curator further illuminates the profundity already readily available in the work. In inadvertent offer of language to the laymen art-lovers.
Quiet Lunch: Many of the painted works were more intimately sized than I’d anticipated from still promo images. Was a sense of intimacy or some other evocative sensation a thrust for this show? Is there a particular sensation you wanted to imbue gallery-goers with upon first entering?
Micaela Giovannotti: “The intimate scale was a deliberate curatorial gesture. Documentation can suggest monumentality, but encountering these pieces in person invites a closer, more embodied mode of looking, one that slows the viewer down and draws them into an almost tactile relationship with the work.
I wanted to create a spatial and emotional rhythm that moves away from spectacle and toward attunement. Intimacy becomes a threshold: it asks viewers to lean in, to register subtle gestures and traces of presence that might otherwise be overlooked.
There were also practical and ethical considerations. Working with an international group of artists, I was mindful of the environmental impact of shipping larger works as in freight emissions, tariffs, customs complexity. More modestly scaled pieces allowed for a more responsible production model without sacrificing conceptual rigor.
Giving each artist a dedicated wall allowed their work to unfold with clarity and integrity, creating internal dialogues within each practice while contributing to a larger collective narrative. Upon entering, the intention was not to overwhelm but to envelop: a quiet immediacy, a sense of being held within the works rather than positioned at a distance from them.“
QL: The eleven artists exhibiting are far flung across the globe. Was that diversity and internationalism a primary goal?
MG: “Internationalism was not only a goal but a curatorial necessity. The artists are geographically and culturally far-reaching, yet deeply aligned in their exploration of the body as a site of memory, transformation, and lived experience.
The inclusion of Shirin Abedinirad and Soraya Sharghi was particularly important. Their work engages with Middle Eastern philosophical and poetic traditions, bringing perspectives that feel especially resonant today, and notably, these concerns were already embedded in the curatorial vision months before the show took shape.
Several artists, Tori, Krizia, and Dario are presenting in New York for the first time, introducing vital new voices into the conversation. Others, like Julia and Turiya, are more established, and the exhibition re-contextualizes their practices within a more intimate, sensorial framework. I also wanted to spotlight gallery artists whose work I deeply admire: Boris, Adelisa, and Noormah, placing them in dialogue with a broader international cohort.
Ultimately, the diversity is not simply geographic but it is conceptual and experiential. The exhibition seeks to create a shared embodied language across differences, where global narratives are felt through the immediacy of the body.”
66.04 cm. / 30 x 26 in.
QL: As someone with a keen curatorial eye, how did you come upon these masterpieces and orchestrate a theme around them? Were some artists tapped to make works expressly intended for this show?
MG: “The process was both intuitive and research-driven, rooted in long-standing dialogues, studio visits, and ongoing attentiveness to practices that engage the body as lived experience.
Some works were created specifically for the show. Zoe developed her two red paintings, Into the Groove and Twist, expressly for the exhibition. We had encountered her work in Miami, and this allowed us to open a conversation around how her visual language, grounded in somatic release and collective movement, could evolve within this context. Her evocation of dancing bodies in humid, nocturnal environments, seen almost through a dewy lens, felt especially compelling. The saturation of her red palette carries both intensity and sensuality.
A similar sensibility emerges in Adelisa’s work, though through a different tonal register. Her paintings depict bodies observed intimately within social and nightlife settings. The softness of her palette seen in lavenders, dusky blues, pinks contrasts beautifully with Zoe’s visceral reds, yet both engage with the body as something porous and shaped by atmosphere and lived communities.
More broadly, the exhibition came together through an orchestration of affinities rather than a fixed thematic imposition. I envisioned it as a constellation where each work retains its autonomy yet contributes to a shared sensorial field. I hope it shows!”
QL: Do any of the pieces in the show feel personally confronting or relatable to you?
MG: “Yes, very much so. There are works in the exhibition that I feel deeply connected to, both on a personal and long-standing professional level. Shirin Abedinirad’s video ALMA is particularly confronting and meditative for me. Her practice consistently engages with cycles of transformation, displacement, and renewal, and in this work there is a quiet, almost elemental vulnerability that resonates on an internal level. It invites a slowing down, a kind of embodied witnessing that feels both intimate and expansive at once.
Similarly, Julia’s ceramic works hold a different, but equally powerful, kind of presence. There is something profoundly grounding in her approach to material, how the body is implied through form, texture, and gesture.
The tactility of clay, shaped and fired, carries a sense of memory and care that I find deeply relatable, almost as if the works hold traces of touch and time. These two artists, in particular, are ones I’ve worked with for a long time, and I feel very close to their practices. That proximity inevitably shapes how I experience their work, not just as a curator, but as someone who has witnessed the evolution of their ideas, their processes, and their sensibilities over time. So while the exhibition as a whole creates a shared field of embodied experience, certain works, like ALMA and Julia’s Green Novelty Cube and Smile, strike a more personal chord, where the curatorial and the intimate begin to overlap.
Each of the eleven artists’ works are showcased in pairs or triplicate, allowing their personal storytelling to echo and expand. Almost like little warrens of consciousness to burrow into.
None of the work can be devoured in one glance. Hue and material may be apparent, rendering skill or charm, but these bodies stories? Must be waited with. Narratives start to reveal themselves…Raw psychological intensity, luminous acts of love and devotion, ancient Persian mythology. Themes such as love and loss in an uncertain future, holding onto loved ones through the act of looking at both the unreality and the necessity of nostalgia, femininity and containment.
The narratives spool on, wrapping around gallery-goers with the sensation of seeing oneself within others. The body holds memory, vital yet ever unstable, it is the scared site where we may reimagine and reinvent. Flesh can transform, resist, a poetic archive that can embody narratives.
Artists on view:
Shirin Abedinirad | @shirin.abedinirad
Krizia Golfo | @kriziagalfo
Dario Carratta | @dariocarratta
Noormah Jamal | @noormah.jamal
Julia M. Kunin | @juliakunin
Turiya Magadlela | @turiya_magadlela
Tori Pounds | @toripounds_
Zoe Schweiger | @zoesschweiger
Adelisa Selimbašić | @adelisa_selimbasic
Soraya Sharghi | @sorayasharghistudio
Boris Torres | @boristorres
Embodied Narratives will be on view until April 25th. Kates-Ferri Projects 561 Grand Street, NYC, 10002. Hours of Operation: Thurs, Fri, & Sat 12pm—6pm and/or by appointment.
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