📍 HUA International, Berlin
📅 August 30 – October 18, 2025
HUA International presents Sweating Under Cold Water, an exhibition featuring Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jinbin Chen, Gordon Hall, and Gordon Matta-Clark. The title’s paradox—sweating under cold water—becomes a powerful metaphor for intimacy, resistance, and queer embodiment simmering beneath the surface.
Revealing that minimalist or fragmented visual languages are not just reductive but a means of preserving memory, touch, and the unseen, the exhibition invites viewers to slow down and look closely rather than consume quickly. These works don’t proclaim loudly; they whisper, dissolve, and make warmth felt in the cold.
Highlighted Artists and Works
- **Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Untitled (Last Light) **
An iconic installation of 24 white light bulbs, both a vigil and an invitation. Reassembled for each exhibition, it becomes a living model of memory. Light serves as both material and metaphor: intimacy, transience, resistance. - Jinbin Chen
Through paintings that blur the figure, Chen renders the body spectral and emotional. Fragmented images of hands, torsos, or feet lean into ambiguity rather than explicitness, transforming opacity into a form of resistance. - Gordon Hall
Blending sculpture, performance, and writing, Hall positions objects as spaces of potential intimacy. Inverted furniture forms, stripped of function, create new sites of contact completed by the viewer’s body. - Gordon Matta-Clark
His Walls photographs, created through radical cuts into structures, expose architecture’s hidden layers. Cracks, voids, and ruins offer an allegorical stage for the visibility struggles of queer and trans bodies.
Drawing on Amelia Jones’s concept of “theatricality,” the exhibition embraces a presentation that accounts for the viewer’s presence, questions authority, and celebrates possibility. Sweating Under Cold Water is not a spectacle but a practice of intimacy.
Like warmth felt under cold water, these works generate an unseen vibration: the insistence of life, light, and memory.
Exhibition Details
📍 Venue: HUA International, Berlin
📅 Dates: August 30 – October 18, 2025
