Exhibition
The Skin On Hot Milk
18 Dec 2017
Event times
Monday 18th December 2017, 6 – 9pm
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- 60 -68 Markfield Road
- London
- N15 4QA
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- 41 (nearest stop broad lane), 243, 76, 149, 259, 279 ,318 ,349 ,476 (all go to Seven Sisters)
- A ten minute walk from Seven Sister Underground Station and Tottenham Hale Underground Station
About
I repulse as the floating film crinkles, the wrinkles of age show on its skin. A bodily form grown in my cup, poured out of search for comfort. Like child to mother, who then wretches and gags expel.
Julia Kristeva cited the skin on hot milk as an example of abjection in her seminal writing Powers of Horror. Put simply abjection is the human reaction, be it horror or vomit, to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.
“The spasms and vomiting protect me. The repugnance, the retching that trusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck.”[1]
Defined as ‘the state of being cast off’, the abject talks of subjects deemed impure or inappropriate for public display. The abject has strong feminist ties in that female bodily functions are often abjected by our patriarchal social order; a context which gives the theme of this accidentally all-female exhibition an added, although unintentional, capability.
“It beseeches, worries and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects...And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.” [1]
[1] Kristeva, J., & Roudiez, L. S. (1982). Powers of horror: an essay on abjection. New York, Columbia University Press.