Installed across all four floors of 439 W 127th St, Not Bodies attempts to disrupt the usual tenor of the gallery space with an arrangement of corporeally rousing work, joining artists who deal in divergent media and are convening from various localities. Contemplating the notion of the physical body as an intrusion in the traditional gallery space - a setting typically conducive only to minds and eyes - Not Bodies offers opposition by centering the social as the fundamental dimension: the cause to gather as a catalyst for the conception, exhibition, and reception of the artworks.

Further to the notion of sociality, Not Bodies reframes the restrictive idea of generational hierarchies. If one is to conceptualise the exhibition as a family gathering, the aunts and uncles are seated interspersed amongst the younger cousins. Attention is drawn to conscious and unconscious encounters between the works’ disparate contexts; visitors trace the formal and conceptual edges of each artist’s position, inhabiting the physical and metaphysical spaces in between. The resultant survey considers a potential sum of intergenerational parts; a metaphoric glimpse at the art-object-as-vehicle.

Not Bodies realises a schematic map of histories and futures as written in the work and relationships of the artists: from video and sound art pioneer Joan Jonas, the eldest participating performer, we come naturally, as if through trickling, to the art, music, and performance of Jasper Marsalis and Christelle Oyiri. From Klein, who counts among her mentors, Leckey, we travel not backwards or forwards in time, but laterally, to her many-times collaborator Josiane M. H. Pozi, whose valiant experiments with video and documentary modes are rightly staged in the company of a new video work by Arthur Jafa. The figurative paintings of Amanda Ba, Pol Taburet, Chase Hall, nakaya mossi and George Rouy provide an illustrative counterpart to conceptual sculpture by Rhea Dillon and Tucker van der Wyden. Likewise, Sara Sadik and Tommy Malekoff’s moving-image vernacular is kindred with the work of Cyprien Gaillard.

The accompanying performative programme, including Chassol, Gabber Eleganza, Joan Jonas, Slauson Malone and more yet to be announced, serves to doubly re-contextualise the space and satiate the para-social tension of the static exhibition. The resultant environment is as much a product of its participants – performers and visitors – as the surrounding exhibition context.