The Simple Body, Solo exhibition ,Westwerk Gallery, Hamburg, 2022.
The simple body, what can be called the mundane body, is what arises from the death of a complex and an expressive body.
An expressive body, a body fluctuating expeditiously between polar states;
from fullness to emptiness, from effort to rest. A body which holds within itself a secret.
A body used to consuming pain, and then, the much longed for, relief.
A simple body, a body that lost its symptoms, its proof, its piece of evidence pointing to the existence of a disease or physical disturbance. The loss of the symptom releases the body from immediate pain, temporary pain, leaving in its wake a continuous and dim ache. And so the body turns apathetic.
This state is compared to the line appearing on the EKG monitor.
The long line of the continuous ache leaves the soul bereft and orphaned from the body that sustained it, becoming in the process a body without a body, an abstract body.
Cohen follows the shape which is created by this destabilizing transition between the death of the symptom and the birth of the simple body.