Phantom Limb brings together works by Maria Palma, Tatyana Cristina and Nadya Ismail around a shared point of departure: the image as a site of apparition, absence and trace. The figure of the butterfly, which appears, disappears and returns, becomes a symbol of this transitory condition. Much like the butterfly, which seems to escape at the very moment we attempt to grasp it, the image in these artists’ works also eludes capture, inhabiting a liminal space where memories, pain and stories survive and return, paradoxically sustained as a phantom limb — through the perception of a presence within absence.
In an intimate relationship with the body and female identity, the exhibition exposes the historical construction of femininity through lack and absence, with hysteria as its most paradigmatic example, alongside other forms of pathologisation and misunderstanding of the experiences of countless women. The works invoke a kind of punctum, or trigger point, within the viewer’s body: one that, while exposing and revealing, also allows a subliminal pain to surface, opening the possibility of care and repair.
By opening this space of return and drawing us into a quiet intimacy, the works of Maria Palma, Tatyana Cristina and Nadya Ismail inhabit a limbo, or a kind of phantasmagoria, that enables new encounters with the gaze. In the possibility of being affected by what we see, they offer a way to reopen, recognise and care for the scars — perhaps invisible — that remain.