Encompassing painting, sculpture, and video, Porous Kinship invites viewers to observe the world through a “magical” and anthropomorphic gaze, one capable of unearthing affinities and resonances between the human body and the natural environment. The exhibition unfolds as a journey that explores the relationship between the human and the more-than-human, reflecting on ecological frameworks, care, and shared responsibility.

As the curator explains: “We are world-assemblages, we have cheeks of cloud, and our internal scars are no different from those of the fractured earth, drought parched. We are bodies of plastic and flesh, we are minerals and debris, foolish savants, unable to look beyond the shape of our own eyes.”
 

Through a reciprocal dialogue with nature, the artists’ works awaken an animistic sensibility, one that uncovers a shared vitality within matter we often mistake as inert.   

In Kesewa Aboah’s metal engravings, the artist’s body, covered in pigments, encounters the surface of the canvas, becoming itself a site of sensory exploration, a porous surface preserving the memory of touch. The dialogue between two bodies is also central to Alberte Agerskov’s piece, which investigates the relationship between marble lime and the acidity of water. The work exposes a reciprocal process that sees the material sculpted over time  by the repeated encounter with water.

 

In Aléa Work’s practice, mycelium is co-author of the work, part of an approach that rethinks how materials are used, understood, and valued. Mineral landscapes and geological formations take on corporeal and emotional qualities in Dimitra Charamandas’s paintings, giving shape to liminal topographies where land and body mirror one another, revealing the tensions between the vulnerability of living systems and the exploitation of ecosystems.     

Finally, Diana Policarpo presents a video work narrated from an eco-centric perspective. Here, an island narrates its own history, weaving myth and memory into a broader story of environmental change and the pressure of extractive forces.    
 

The show unfolds in close dialogue with the gallery’s architecture, featuring site-specific interventions to amplify the connection between body, matter, and environment. In doing so, Artopia reaffirms its role as a space for sensory reactivation. As the curator notes: “Looking is not a matter of sight, but of relation with the Other, and if the idiocy of the contemporary hustle alienates us from the possibility of relating to the soul of the natural ecosystem, then let Art reawaken our capacity to feel.”