EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

About ✧Slow Hand Movements✧* Gentle Whispers * Water * Salt * Tingles *

Boers-Li Gallery New York is delighted to present ✧Slow Hand Movements✧* Gentle Whispers * Water * Salt * Tingles *. Taking the online world of ASMR videos as a reference, this group exhibition presents works by artists that foreground the instrumentality of touch in the phenomenological experience of the lived body, especially bodies that requisitely and recreationally navigate physical and virtual spaces.

In the ASMR genre, creators upload self-produced videos of themselves doing what would typically be considered outrageously mundane tasks - such as tapping on books, whispering instructions, crinkling cellophane wrappers, and so on - in order to conjure “sounds that feel good”. To produce these affective moments, which can “trigger” sensations of aroused relaxation, everyday objects are made devoid of their customary functions, and are repurposed to perform audio-visually in ways that exude tactility, timbre, and intimate proximity.

There is an inherent queerness in this pursuit of pleasurable sensations. Listening to objects as a means of self-touch untethers our practical and productive connections to them, redirecting the flow of experience. This remediation eschews normative conventions, and proposes an alternate way to communicate and experience the sensuality of objects. The phenomenon of ASMR also points to larger issues about the negotiations of desire and materiality through digitally-mediated means [such as fingers and numerical data], and this exhibition presents work that re-attends to the materiality of objects and gestures in order to compel new orientations to thingness, systems, pattern, vocality, self-care, pleasure, and arousal.