In a cultural moment obsessed with polish, curation, and the digital sublime, Base Materialism at Albion Jeune cuts clean against the grain — or rather, burrows right into the meat of it. Bringing together seven artists — Ambera Wellmann, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Fin Simonetti, Ivana Bašić, Rachel Rossin, Shuyi Cao, and Shuo Hao — the exhibition revisits Georges Bataille’s unruly concept of base materialism a century on, dragging it bodily into the present alongside Julia Kristeva’s dark fascination with the abject.
Here, the human form is not so much depicted as it is undone. These works revel in what polite society tries to repress: fluids, flesh, fur, bone. They refuse to be embalmed in idealised notions of beauty or order. Instead, fragmented limbs, beast-like hybrids, and cyborg echoes crawl across the thresholds between human and animal, organic and synthetic, attraction and repulsion. The exhibition does not offer tidy answers — only viscera.
The installation itself heightens this discomfort. Works hang from above or squat low to the ground, catching the viewer off-balance. A bruised, fleshy palette seeps through the space, collapsing the distance between elegance and raw corporeality. It’s a deliberate destabilisation: a physical push away from the lofty and symbolic, back down into what Bataille argued was our true substratum — matter that writhes, leaks, decays.
Ambera Wellmann, “You Burn Me”, 2022
What Base Materialism makes clear is that the body — unruly, unstable — remains a potent site for cultural revolt. In an era of digital avatars and smoothed-over surfaces, these artists insist on reminding us what lies beneath. Kristeva described the abject as “one of those violent, dark revolts of being.” Here, that revolt is not just staged — it’s celebrated as foundational.
In the messy vitality of these works, the posthuman emerges not as sterile AI fantasy but as something stickier and stranger — an acceptance that the base cannot be transcended, only confronted. Base Materialism suggests that perhaps it is in this uncomfortable, unresolved place — between disgust and desire, beauty and horror — that the future of embodiment really begins.
Base Materialism runs through to August 30.
