Kates Ferri Projects is pleased to present Embodied Narratives, a group exhibition curated by Micaela Giovannotti bringing together eleven contemporary artists who transform the human body into a language of storytelling, emotion, and radical reimagining. Opening March 6, 2026, the exhibition features painting, sculpture, ceramics, textile art, and video by Shirin Abedinirad, Dario Carratta, Krizia Galfo, Noormah Jamal, Julia Kunin, Turiya Magadlela, Tori Pounds, Zoe Schweiger, Adelisa Selimbasic, Soraya Sharghi, and Boris Torres.

Opening in anticipation of International Women's Day on March 8, the exhibition amplifies the voices of women artists from across the globe, including Bosnia, Iran, Italy, South Africa, UK and the United States, whose works reclaim the body as a site of power, resistance, and self-determination.

In an era of digital disembodiment and AI-generated imagery, Embodied Narratives reaffirms the body as a vital, unstable, and poetic archive: a site where personal and collective memory, cultural mythology, and lived experience converge. Each artist approaches the figure not as static representation but as living narrative: flesh that remembers, transforms, and resists.

The artists in this exhibition are fully invested as protagonists, activists, advocates standing directly in front of their work. Their presence is palpable: in the visible skill and technical mastery, in the unmistakable personal lens through which each body is rendered, and in the urgent conviction that these are not mere images but testimonies. These works are deeply personal acts of witnessing, reclamation, and reimagining.

Highlights Include:

Shirin Abedinirad's meditative video performance ALMA, in which the artist slowly paints her own mirrored reflection, becomes a powerful meditation on identity, autonomy, and the erasure of individuality under societal expectations.

Krizia Galfo's hyperrealistic oil paintings including an enigmatic blindfolded portrait and luminous studies of inflated and deflated balloons, probe the thin membrane between presence and absence, desire and concealment.

Dario Carratta transfers dystopian visions onto canvas through oil paintings populated by characters suspended between the physicality of reality and the evanescence of dreams. His work presents a murky dreamlike atmosphere where figures exist on the borderline of consciousness, exploring the body as a site of psychological tension and surreal transformation.

Noormah Jamal constructs dreamlike symbolic worlds in I Remember Her and While You Were Gonedrawn from collective and personal mythologies, where figures bridge identity, culture, and transcendence.

Julia Kunin's iridescent ceramic sculptures Novelty Cube and Smile merge the body with landscape and the grotesque, transforming decorative arts into gender-fluid warriors that address sexuality, decay, and queer embodiment.

Turiya Magadlela's monumental textile compositions, woven from nylon pantyhose and materials associated with femininity and containment into celebrations of Black womanhood and resistance in post-apartheid South Africa.

Tori Pounds renders an intimate oil stick portrait of her grandfather, exploring how we hold onto loved ones through the act of looking. Her semi-surreal paintings examine how imagery hold memory, balancing the familiar with the alien through expressive layers that reveal both the unreliability and necessity of nostalgia.

Zoe Schweiger's blurred, rain-soaked portraits dissolve in Miami's humid atmosphere, exploring intimacy against the backdrop of climate crisis and environmental precarity in South Florida. Her distorted figures become visual poems about love and loss in an uncertain future.

Adelisa Selimbasic channels raw psychological intensity through expressive gestural portraits where flesh dissolves into pure feeling of magnified abstracted details. Her canvases pulse with visceral emotion, capturing the turbulent inner landscapes of her subjects.

Soraya Sharghi creates new myths by molding ancient Persian mythology to her own purpose, conjuring extraordinary and supernatural beings through watercolors of the female figure and womb-like shapes that forge a universal language bridging history, personal imagination, and contemporary power dynamics.

Boris Torres celebrates queer life and chosen family through intimate oil portraits of artists, activists, and friends from a Latin American immigrant perspective, rendering LGBTQ+ community with tender directness. His masterful use of light and color imbues warmth and presence, transforming personal moments into luminous acts of love and documentation.

About the Exhibition

Embodied Narratives proposes art as a space where emotion, memory, and imagination resist easy interpretation. The works on view blur boundaries between flesh and fiction, the seen and the felt, asking what stories our bodies carry, and what it means to render a figure in paint, clay, fabric, or light.

From hyperrealist portraiture to surrealist ceramics, from video performance to monumental textile abstraction, these eleven artists share a commitment to the body as more than image: it is a site of becoming, a repository of histories both intimate and collective, and a resistance against forgetting.

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Video of exhibition on YouTube

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