SEIZURE was the first solo exhibition in Scandinavia by Marianna Simnett. In her mesmerising installation Faint with Light and video parable The Needle and the Larynx, normative bodies and genders undergo radical transformations. The artist’s own body, mutated and remodeled, becomes the site in which her hypnotic fantasies are played out.

The exhibition presented two of Simnett’s most arresting works, in which the body either metamorphoses or momentarily vanishes. A seizure, according to the writer and mythographer Marina Warner, describes the effect of the passions on the body. Inner forces such as madness and folly, personified in tragedies of the Greek poet Homer as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession. Together, Simnett’s works function as a portrait of an untamed body.

Marianna Simnett (b.1986) lives and works in London. Through performance, video, watercolour, and installation, she challenges how bodies are perceived and imagined. Uncanny narratives display the body as a site of dispute, performing surgical interventions and gestures of collapse and ecstasy.

Solo exhibitions and commissions include FACT, Liverpool (2019) and the Frans Hals Museum, Amsterdam (2019), as well as the New Museum, New York (2018); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018); Matt’s Gallery, London (2017); Seventeen Gallery, New York and London (2016). Her works were also included in group exhibitions at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Sadie Coles, London (2019).