EMBODIMENT
23 May, 2025 – 30 June, 2025
Curated by Romana Drdová
Embodiment brings together three artists—Polina Masevnina, Renata Machýčková, and Bára Tetaurová—who explore the body as a site of memory, identity, and transformation. Through diverse approaches rooted in sensory experience and personal narrative, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the body not as a fixed form, but as a living, expressive process shaped by emotion, culture, and myth.
In contemporary discourse, embodiment can best be understood as the lived experience of subjectivity through the body—not merely as an object of observation or a biological apparatus. It means perceiving the body as an active participant in experience, as a medium through which we relate to the world, to others, and to ourselves. The body is not a passive vessel, but a site (or more precisely, a process) where perception, memory, emotion, and identity unfold
Together, these three artists create a space in which the body becomes a medium through which to explore identity, memory, desire, and myth. Embodiment presents embodiment as a process that is intimate, sensorial, and culturally conditioned—a dynamic that oscillates between reality and its imagined alternatives.
Themes of embodiment
works with photographic images as tools of both documentation and fiction. Her series depicts moments that are ordinary and intensely personal at once—initially appearing as raw, documentary snapshots, but upon closer inspection revealing a carefully curated narrative choreography. We are drawn into fragments of a life that is aesthetically refined, emotionally charged, and disarmingly revealing—perhaps to the point where we wish to become part of it ourselves.
Polina Masevnina (1997) is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Russia, now based in the Czech Republic. She uses her own body as both a tool and medium. Her practice lies at the intersection of radical intimacy, post-love narratives, and pornographic aesthetics. Her works often take the form of minimal but conceptually charged objects that explore the tension between the personal and the political.
Polina Masevnina
Renata Machýčková
approaches the body as a multilayered symbol. Through painterly gestures, she depicts female figures that evoke film heroines, muses, or monstrous beings. Fragmentation, torsos, and unfinished forms introduce tension between narrative and its disruption. Without passing judgment, she lets each figure resonate as an unsettling image of desire, pain, or power.
Renata Machýčková (1988) is a Czech artist based in Bergamo, Italy. She works primarily with painting and works on paper, often incorporating wax as a key material. A distinctive element of her practice is the use of a scalpel to carve relief structures into paper, evoking tactile associations and exploring physical contact and materiality as essential components of her work.
Bára Tetaurová
a student in the K.O.V. studio and a practicing physiotherapist, explores the body through experimental design.
For this exhibition, she created a collection of perfumes derived from the essences of human sweat collected during states of sexual arousal. These scents, extracted in collaboration with volunteers, lead us to reflect on physicality, instinct, and intimacy. Offered as tools for imagination, they are provocative, unsettling—perhaps even liberating. They raise questions: What stirs our desire? How do we respond to the scent of others? And to what extent are we willing to admit that even what is considered animalistic or unconscious shapes who we are?
Bára Tetaurová (1990) is a student in the K.O.V. studio at UMPRUM and a trained physiotherapist. She contributes a sensory dimension to the exhibition through her collection of perfumes containing pheromonal samples collected during states of sexual arousal. Her work examines the boundary between scientific recording and intimacy, between the body and experimental design.