In Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical essay collection Corpus, published in 1992, the concept of the body is defined through the ontological category of “touch.” According to Nancy, the body is not a closed unity but an open network of touches, constituted through complex configurations of contact and oriented toward the outside world. The touch always appears as an event-like boundary experience that unfolds in an in-between space: an encounter that renders the body vulnerable and exposed, while at the same time, through its radical openness, makes it permeable and transformable.
On a conceptual level, the Figures of Touch – partially displaced from its original context and meaning – are structured by this Nancyan notion of touch. Through various mediums, the artists render bodily experiences visible. This wide spectrum of experience is articulated in the artworks through different modalities of touch: contact, self-touch, the perception of boundaries, as well as figures of interruption and absence of touch. The represented forms of touch activate diverse affective and semantic layers, ranging from the erotic—unproductive—act to painful and destructive experiences. In this interpretation, the body does not appear as a unified identity but as exposure. It functions as a carrier of complex psychological, personal, and cultural-historical traces, as well as a site of boundary experiences. Rather than striving to represent the body, the artists, through its abstraction, create situations of contact in which bodies—human and non-human, personal and political—are exposed to one another.