The Schinkel Pavillon brings together the worlds of the late Swiss visionary HR Giger (1940-2014) and the South Korean artist Mire Lee (b. 1988), transforming into a site for an exploration of the darkest aisles of the human body and psyche. This equally seductive and dystopian scenario is the first institutional exhibition of Giger’s work in Germany, as well as the first major presentation of Lee’s work here.

Encounters, contact and coalition are processes of contamination. Distinct entities collide and change. A substance, being or community is tainted, corrupted or afflicted by something else. Purity is an illusion. Phantasms of purity characterise the ventures of European Western modernity. They reside in, but aren’t limited to epistemological pursuits, the striving for stable categories, precise boundaries and clear-cut identities. These imaginaries tend to be centred on a rational, self-determined subject – all too often straight, white and male – who claims to embody the human in its purest form.

Bringing together new and recent works—several of which have been especially conceived for this occasion—“Breathing Through Skin” highlights four artists and their critical invocations of monstrosity—the monster as constructed motif in horror and the monstrous as an inherent wildness intrinsic to desire. Together, these works traverse a range of binaries, provoking an erotic and affective engagement with bodies in the world, beyond the trappings of monstrified difference.

The exhibition builds up an eerie tension with a concrete wall that blocks the sight of the main installation, before you are bombarded with “Carriers” — a kinetic installation that almost looks too grotesque to be called art. 
 Lee is a young artist born in 1988 who has been known to experiment with materiality and the idea of life.