Laura Gozlan - Pacify your lust before the all-seeing eye feels your heartbeat rising

You can feel the pressing heat spilling inside of your body
It’s feeding your nerve endings
It rhythmizes them, tickles them
Hurry up, quick, before they see you
Hold up a little, release and …

Franco “Bifo” Berardi says, that capitalism is “based on an endless postponement of
pleasure, and simultaneously on the permanent excitement of desire” 1 . In this context, we can view the boiling ways of self-gratification and absorbing moments of climaxing as subtle, mass-practiced instants of resistance, which, however, do not deny the logic described by Bifo. On the contrary, they adopted it, ride with it and use it in their own revolutionary benefit.

Extension and postponement of the moment of climax makes it more intense and all the more excites us and our desires to reach it again, but despite the mentioned logic of
capitalism is pleasure – more or less articulated, more or less directly and more or less
involving our bodies – close at hand almost anytime.

Laura Gozlan’s installation composes a space of performative experience of climax. She
positions the moments of theatrically articulated lust and satisfaction into a contrasting and intimate environment disrupted by dark moments which disarray the social standards, and which refer to prosthetic aesthetics or senescence. In her videos moist by various bodily liquids (Dead Fingers Talk, I, II and III, 2021) we see an older woman situated in a composed setting of a theatre scene, loudly and shamelessly pleasing herself while confronting us with her penetrative, patriarchy unnerving looks. Together with objects derived from the shape of clitoris and torso castings, referring to self-restricting and – metaphorically speaking – the effort to pour bodies into stiff, impermeable forms, the artist points out to conceptions that were introduced to us as “innapropriate”, as “tabu”. She confronts our internalized discomfort from unfiltered gratification, sexuality of the elderly or prosthetic bodies… Orgasm thus
becomes a mobilizing element, an accelerator. The beginning, the process, the end.

Text by Ema Hesterová

Laura Gozlan (*1979) lives and works in Paris. She studied art and scenography at TAIK (Helsinki), at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and graduated from Le Fresnoy in 2007. Recently, she took part in shows such as: Possédé.e.s, Panacée, CAC, Montpellier curated by and When the time swirls, when it turns into a black tunnel curated by Maija Rudovska at Futura Prague, following a residency. Her solo show titled Onanism Sorcery is currently on view at 40m cube, Rennes. Upcoming is her solo show at Les Bains-Douches, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Alençon. Laura Gozlan is represented by Galerie Valeria Cetraro in Paris.

https://lauragozlan.com

The gallery program is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council. 

Photography: APART Collective / Chiara Rendeková