ABOUT

Leon Eixenberger’s body of work, ‚Sun Echo‘, is characterized by an aesthetic of touch. At the heart of the work lies the human body as an intersubjectively defined unity of body and soul.

Eixenberger’s work is characterized by a syntax that reinterprets the artistic language of early performance and conceptual art and makes it poetically active within today’s society shaped by techno-capitalism. The artist’s choice of a grammar of the sensual intends a "communalization of experience rather than its conversion into virtual and social currency.”

Integrating sites, often through the meaning of their use, his spatial and relational constellations or experiential models appear in urban and non-urban landscapes, transforming their social protocols and intersubjective perceptions. The artist’s works are invitations to a contemplation on the complex experience of touch and its erotic dimension in terms of an emancipatory political potential—as opposed to their consumption.

Eixenberger thinks touch through the erotic as ‚a question not only of what we do, but as a question of how acutely we can feel in the doing‘(1). It is a conscious decision to live erotically and it refuses disaffection in all vital endeavors. For him the erotic is self-connection, deep knowledge and when not sequestered to the private domain and not feared, a guide, a creative life force, an illumination that is social. ‚To fight the neoliberal state is also to erotically and poetically occupy it.‘(2)

The desire to touch and be touched by the amorous other is always also the desire to touch another world, while a strenuous intention towards non-touching or the dissenting imperative to not touch or be touched can be just as much about touching otherwise. Contact and/or its refusal, gesture toward a theatrical agency, a notion that frequently appears in Eixenberger’s situations as a parameter of the spaces, in which the public constitutes itself.



(1) Audre Lorde in ‚Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power‘
(2) Hypatia Vourloumis in ‚Ten Theses on Touch, or, Writing Touch‘