Xxijra Hii is pleased to present the first duo exhibition at the gallery by Louis Blue Newby and Laila Majid.

‘Many theoreticians of the body represent the skin as if it were a Mobius strip of ribbon that twists around to touch on every organ, muscle, and nerve inside the body, and then spirals about to bring the inside surface outward, so that the inside touches every segment of skin on the outside of the body’ - Louise Kaplan, Cultures of Fetishism

‘Sex writing differs from other forms of representation in that it has some kind of chemical effect on the reader. I get hard, I can’t contain myself. A fugue results between the closed system of language and the complex system of molecules that holds my body together a real communication begins’ - Kevin Kiliian, Sex Writing and the New Narrative

Redness — blushing, hot flushes, blood rushing through veins and approaching the surface of the skin. A worn leather jacket, a paddle which smarts upon impact, leaving welts of pink and white. A door left ajar, a floor coated in red, a windowed facade, part oxblood, part cherry; a glossy, sumptuous pool of colour that recalls the warm wetness of the body.

Unpacking the intersection of their individual concerns, Majid and Newby’s collaborative practice attempts to construct a language based on mediation itself. With their mutual interest in the subcultural languages of leather, fetish and body modification, their new body of work explores the skin as a site of exchange, collaboration and desire, and positions exposure as an exercise in collectivity.

In SKINFLICKS the body constitutes the origins of the colour spectrum. A colour which indicates vitality and bodily exertion, the exhibited works are tinted and intensified by the pinkish-red hues of the corporeal. The space within the exhibition consequently illuminates our collective fantasies of ‘the body’s exposed interior’, both uncomfortable and intensely seductive in equal measure.

Collaged imagery sits under grease-stained archival paper and transparent casts of leather surfaces. To read material through the surface of the skin, lifted from pornography & fetish magazines, piercing advertisements and photographs taken at tattoo conventions, speaks to a reading style that is chemical and carnal rather than cognitive; and is encouraging of messy and unreconcilable modes of longing.

Pressed down, held open and inviting the viewers gaze, the Spread series takes the double-page magazine spread as a visual and material framework. Each image within these works carries its own public, an audience connected through their shared investment in subversion. Observing these works encourages modes of thinking outside the private/public dichotomy and in turn produces its own form of privacy within public.

‘Liquid Silk’ (2022) a collage work by Newby, utilises Crisco, a form of vegetable fat, historically used as lubricant within gay sexual-subcultures. This material, eases open the page as if the body, allowing multiple layers of found, re-printed and traced imagery and text to become visible on a single plain. His practice seeks to sully the sanitised and normative languages that surround archiving and to in turn produce a new archival language that centres queered forms of desire.

‘Pressure Release’ (2022) by Majid reimagines the form of a balance board, an object commonly used as a training device in fitness. Upholstered in latex and foam, this object simultaneously exists as both an object of fetish and exercise, the two contexts linked together by a shared association of bodily exertion. Fingerprints, scuff marks and scratches left in its powdery surface prompt the viewer to imagine actions of speculative bodily activity.

Recent solo shows as part of their collaborative practice include not yet (2022), San Mei Gallery, London, healthy pink (2020), springseason, London, and hold my hand by the tail (2019), Transition Two, London. Their work has also been featured in group exhibitions including City Entwined (2022), Paradise Row, London, Sour Persimmons Chasm (2019), Ex Baldessarre, curated by Andy Holden, and Hydrangea (2019), Underground Flower, Nakhon Ratchasima. In 2020, they were awarded funding by the Elephant Trust, were recipients of the Omni Colour Artists Award (2021) and have recently been selected as part of the CIRCA x Dazed Class of 2022.

Please contact us for a list of available works and prices.