BREAKING #325

See All This is censored

Nicole Ex

Column

June 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

June 2026

On the day of the launch, we received a message from our international distributor. A number of five-star hotels in London and high-speed rail lounges, she wrote, had decided not to carry See All This #42 – The Body because of its nature and subject matter: ‘as the imagery contains exposed bodies, nudity and explicit content.’

Shortly after the email came in, Lynn, our producer, called to ask how we should respond. I said, rather delightedly, that I found it an unexpected turn of events, but also one that perfectly illustrated why we had made this issue in the first place. Lynn repeated the gist of the message, just to be sure: ‘So they basically don’t want to offer it to their guests?!’

A strange contradiction has emerged. Images of naked bodies in artworks are increasingly censored on digital platforms, while pornography – even in its most degrading forms – is available within seconds. As are shameless forms of violence, war, famine, human oppression and exploitation.

Almost a year ago, Marlene Dumas wrote to me that she might consider collaborating with See All This if we were willing to address war, but that See All This might be ‘too elegant a magazine’ for that. And now our ‘elegant magazine’ has been deemed too explicit. That says something about censorship, but also about the remarkable power an image of a naked body still holds.

As a counterweight, it felt important to create a space in which the body could be visible in all its power and complexity, longing and freedom. An issue in which innocent naked bodies jump, run and dive into the water together, and in which Dumas’s watercolour nudes show their bottoms and make love.

It reminds us that the question of what may be seen – and who gets to decide – should by no means be confined to what happens on online platforms. It is a cultural question. With The Body, we are glad to attempt a fearless answer: by making visible what has belonged to the domain of art for centuries, and what it means to be human.

Read Nicole’s speech given at the launch here.