Bestia

Elizabeth Xi Bauer presents Bestia , a solo exhibition of new works by Pia Camil. The show marks both the artist's debut solo exhibition in London and her first presentation with the gallery. Drawing from personal experience, the exhibition explores the unstable boundaries between looking and being looked at.

Continuing Camil's long-standing interest in dismantling fixed narratives and hierarchies, this upcoming exhibition invites viewers to connect with their own desire as a place for resistance. Throughout Bestia , Camil rejects binary ways of thinking that seek to separate instinct from intellect and the public from the private. Instead, the exhibition embraces complexity, emphasising the coexistence of multiple truths regarding the female experience.

By unsettling fixed notions of womanhood and inherited structures, Camil argues for a nuanced understanding of identity and subjectivity, based on the collective experience.

Central to Bestia is an exploration of desire as a source of vitality, which is nurtured rather than suppressed. Influenced by texts such as Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) and Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020), Camil positions the instinctual as a catalyst for liberation.

Drawing on Lorde's conception of embodied knowledge as a source of agency and self-knowledge, Camil considers it a force that reconnects us with joyous possibilities. For the artist, an insistence on pleasure becomes the alternative to being confronted with increasingly restrictive socio-political constructs.