EXTENDED UNTIL OCTOBER 10
From 10 to 30 September 2025, the Aorta Social Art Gallery in Pisa will host the exhibition ‘Ex Contactu. Relics of pain, love and pleasure’ by artist Maria Gvardeitseva.
The exhibition Ex Contactu explores how the body becomes sacred not through detachment or idealisation, but through direct emotional experience.
The Latin term ex contactu, meaning “from contact”, traditionally refers to third-class relics in Catholicism: objects made sacred by touching something sacred. In this exhibition, that sacredness does not arise from canonisation or death, but from intimate, lived thresholds — where the body encounters pain, love, pleasure, betrayal, birth, injury, joy and orgasm. Rather than illustrating these states, the works activate them. They become traces of memory, gestures of survival.
Through rooms, wax, water and video, the artist constructs a temporary, fragile and sensory visual language. These materials melt, dissolve, evaporate — just like emotions. A set of sculptural gestures in sign language translates eight emotional words into a physical grid — a silent structure of expression that rejects the usual systems of articulation. Elsewhere, votive wax figures, inspired by Mediterranean devotional traditions, are reimagined as contemporary relics: anonymous, faceless, yet intimately familiar. One becomes a long braid — a relic of continuity, care and maternal complexity.
This is not an exhibition about holiness or purity. It is a return of the body to itself — not as an idealised image, but as a lived place of transformation. The works do not monumentalise emotion. Rather, they trace its residue — what remains, what resists and what demands.
INFO
Opening hours: every day from noon to 8 pm
Cost: 10€ (adults) | 8€ (12-18 years old)| 5€ (children under 12 years old)
