Latest Issue

No. 42 Summer 2026 25.00

BREAKING #336

Body language

Nicole Ex

Column

Nicole Ex

Nicole Ex

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

There are some issues you want to say goodbye to properly. So, at the start of a new season, I leaf through our Summer issue The Body, with Marlene Dumas, one more time – a kind of finissage. I revisit the conversations, images, stories and lines that stayed with me. Nine quotes on the physical and imagined body:

‘We are our bodies and yet we are not.’
– Marlene Dumas

From Any Body There?, the exhibition-on-paper about bodies under pressure.

‘Before a leader speaks, his body has already spoken.’
– Daan Heerma van Voss

From The President’s Body, on power and the body of the leader.

‘Physically, we will never fully come apart.’
– Sarah Knigge

From Labourland: Stories from the Womb, on birth and what remains with us.

‘When you see your reflection in water, do you recognise the water in you?’
– Roni Horn

From The Body of Water, on water that never disappears, but always returns somewhere else.

‘A pleased body is free.’
– Jessica Collins

From Pleasure Principles, on the art of pleasure.

‘There are forms of knowledge that crave our attention. Pleasure is one of them.’
– Jessica Collins

From A Red-Hot Handbook for Hand Jobs, our handbook for which reading alone will not suffice.

‘The body never lied to me.’
– William Forsythe

From The Body Never Lied to Me, on what the body knows before we listen to it.

‘I begin with the body as it is. There is already so much intelligence there.’
– Rosa Esteva

From Nothing in Nature Is Static, on clothing conceived from the body.

And then there is this one.

Marlene writes that someone once told her that where they grew up, there was no word for love. Instead, they would say:

‘I like seeing you.’

I can’t imagine a more beautiful final line.

— Nicole Ex,
founding editor

See All This #42 – The Body with Marlene Dumas is available from our shop.

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